Unjustified Anthropomorphism

I've been a busy little squirrel! I don't recall actually being a squirrel, it just seemed appropriate at the moment. I am busy though; got a rather large list of tasks ongoing, although I've actually made good progress through them yesterday and today. Have bulletted list goodness:

Things that have priority:

• Satisfy Inland Revenue; they sent me a stupid form asking what jobs I've been doing since last October, even though they could've told from my tax return that I've only been self employed. It also wants my weekly wage, which I can't answer because I don't have one. I just wrote £0.00 in all the boxes and attatched a note to bitch at them a bit. They also expect me to pay the postage to send it back. (Done this)
• Pay my National Insurance (I'll do this in the morning)
• Finish the leaflet for advitising technical support (Done this)
• Get the leaflet into some shop windows (I'll do this in the morning)
• Rewrite my technical support advert for the local newsletter
• Submit local newsletter advert to whoever publishes it
• Finish Xu, my Visual Basic auto-update library (Did this last night)
• Integrate Xu into CaliHQ2, when Graham's finished with it
• Redesign the FourCC database for afreeCodecVT
• Write new codec browser for afreeCodecVT
• Update the portfolio on XVII's site (Done, along with some other changes, but need to approve with Graham before uplodaing
• Add a technical support section to XVII's site (Started, taking longer than I hoped of course)
• When technical support site is done, start some low-cost online advertising sending people to the 'build a custom PC' page
• Consider the 'search portal' idea to see if I think it's viable to compete. (Done, will detail later)
• Update LiveJournal (Well...)
• Buy Shanna's present, and when I receive it, email the company to tell tham that I love their product but their site is teh suck (because it is), and offer my services as convincingly as possible (Bought it, just waiting for it to arrive)

Things on hold:

• Get status of CaliHQ2 from Graham, and help clear the list if there's things to be done (On hold because Tux knows where Graham is)
• Ask about affiliation on the afree network (Will do this when I'm finished with afreeCodecVT)
• Look at starting to sell mobile phones (Yes, seriously. Need to talk to Graham first)
• Start Caroline's site (Would be good to work with Graham in the same place to start)

Things that are ongoing:

• Work on FoodSystem2005 - de-branded CaliHQ3 (Made lots of progress, but much more to do)
• Diary (Will it never end? I'm about halfway through Oxford... not even got to the best/worst bit yet)
• Immigration Legalities (Ten billion self-contradicting rules about who can stay, where, for how long, for which reasons, and how to apply. Mmm, fun)

I've gone to bed at 6am the last three days, and got up not long after. Looks like the same tonight. Hopefully though, I'll start to see some of it pay off as the technical support gets going (Please, Tux). The advertising in the local shops is about 60p per week - not going to get much better than that, so I'm going to put it in all the places around here.

I've spent an entire day and night working on afreeCodecVT, but don't mind so much because I spent the time developing Xu, in a reuseable way, so I can now literally just take the module, put it in CaliHQ, and have auto-update support. VB has been driving me insane again though. Take this bit of code:

p=10 : for n=1 to p : print n : p=p-1 : next n

I wouldn't know without thinking about it carefully whether I'd get numbers up to five or six - though I'd guess in favour of five - but I certainly would not expect to get numbers up to ten. After all, even after the first iteration, p has already become nine. VB does indeed though, give me from one to ten. Of course, in this example it's easy to see what's happening, bit in one of the inner loops of my code, I couldn't work out for ages why it wasn't doing what I expected. In the end I replaced it with a change to the effect of:

n=1 : p=10 : do : print n : p=p-1 : n=n+1 : loop until n=p

This works as intended. Woo, wasted time. I've no idea why I chose p by the way, but n goes back to my Spectrum days; for some reason loops always had to be n and m if I needed two. Any more than that, I was stuck. Have to venture out into the scary world of other letters. Anyway, that was the minor VB irritation. The major one came later, when it decided there was now an INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR. They're the worst things you can possibly get, because they're not your fault, and you can usually fix them just by moving the code around randomly until the parser is de-confused, but there's no telling how, or how long it'll take you. I spent three hours trying to get it to compile again. I eventually managed it by moving one single line of code into a sub of it's own, and calling it in place of the original line. Exactly the same in logical terms, but suddenly, just as randomly as the error had appeared, it went away again. Argh.

I was mildly excited (yep, excited) the other night, when I finally found the River Bourne. I've lived in Bournemouth my entire life, but always wondered where the river was. Turns out it was right in front of me all the time - it's the little 'stream' that runs through the lower gardens. I'd always assumed that was just a bit of it, but apparently that's just all that's left of it by the time it makes it to the sea. Not that it's very big even when it starts, branching off from the River Avon (which is a proper-sized river), but it's only about a metre wide by the time it gets to the gardens.

I'm tired. I might get a little bit of sleep before I get up, call Graham, confirm the advertising-related stuff, go into kinson, give them the leaflets, pay my NI, and then possibly head up to Graham's house depending on whether he's got a TK Maxx shift or not.

One day, I'll win an award for overuse of italics. Or maybe not, knowing the competition. This post features manual line-breaks.