The Inner Circle

I’ve had this strange feeling all day, first it was just being incredibly tired, and now it’s developed into a distraction. I woke up mid dream today, I guess any point you wake up and you remember a dream you where in the middle of it, it was strange, I don’t know what woke me up. But I think it might have been the dream, it wasn’t by any definition a nightmare.

It’s been nagging all day, I’ve been putting it to the back of my mind so that I could think about it later. I can’t recall that much of it now, but I’m going to try and go through it.

I’m not sure where it exactly starts, but the earliest point that I can remember is sitting with a group of people from high school, I can’t recall who most of them where, but I know they where from high school. I also know that one of them was Kellie B, any of you who know my high school will know that she was pretty much the head girl so to speak.

She wasn’t nasty in anyway, or evil, she was just a nice girl, good looking, that everybody liked. Most girls wanted to be like her, and most guys wanted to “date” her, myself not excluded. Thinking of this, I guess I’ve been thinking a fair bit about high school after talking to Mark a week last Friday, I went to the pub to see him and Pete Greenwood, and apparently I’d missed a lot of people from high school. Kellie and Cheryl among them, this maybe where most of the thoughts are from.

In the dream I think we where at a pub or other social place, equal number of boys to girls. I don’t recall much about this part of it, just that we where there as a group. The dream shifted somehow to an outside scene, or maybe just a wider angle, we may have been sitting outside.

We all stood at one end of a tiled garden type area, at the other side there was a raised platform. Someone thought it would be fun to see who picked who to pair up, I’m not sure where this came from. The boys stood on this platform, and one by one the girls choose one person to be paired. This wasn’t a pairing to do anything, just a see who would have picked who, I think it was in context of dating, but I’m not sure.

I don’t recall who anyone picked, but I know a black haired girl, average height picked me. I don’t know who she was. I don’t really recall anyone I knew well with black hair.

Our positions where then reversed, the guys had to pick girls. Somehow then there where suddenly a lot more girls, like loads. So again the guys started to pick girls. I don’t recall who the guys where, I do recall that Carl Scott picked Kellie. I think I’d have chosen her, except now I couldn’t.

So I remember looking through the crowd trying to find someone I’d pick. I remember looking through the crowd, I saw Angie H with a rather well done hair style. But I don’t really recall anyone else’s name, faces flick through my mind, but I’m not sure who they are.

I never actually picked anyone that I can recall, I think I began to panic. This is roughly at the point I woke up, I’m not sure what brought this dream on. Maybe it runs parallel to a feeling that I haven’t really attempted to find a girlfriend here at home. I’m trying to find a job, start my life, yet I’m not looking for anything as far as a companion goes. Maybe I’m scared I’ll be left alone. It’s odd, it’s had me in a strange frame of mind all day.

Anyway, about other things, I’ve built studio A’s playout machine for Bailrigg FM, it’s got all the sounds cards in it and it seems happy. Tests need to be run on it, but otherwise it looks good. Then the playout software needs to be finished and all should be good.

Apart from that, not much else,

D.

Well I finaly pulled my finger out today and decided to do something with my CV and career. I’ve submitted my CV to two online agencies, and applied to a job through one of them.

Ironically enough it’s moneysupermarket.com, the one suggested by Mum’s work friends. I’ve applied for an “IT Graduate” post, we’ll see if it comes to anything. I had to write a covering letter as they asked “What are your sallery expectations for this job?”.

Damned wierdest thing I’ve ever had to write, at least it’s something to tell the job centre tomorrow. I’m kinda excited about this one too, it seems like a reasonable company and a group I’d probably like to work for, there seems to be plenty of scope inside of the company too.

Lifes fine continuing here, parents get back on Friday, Joy should also be visiting on Friday too, which will be fun.

I’ve not done much on the CMS or POS over the past three days, I’ve thought about them, but my heart just hasn’t been in doing them. Maybe tomorrow.

Oh well, that’s pritty much it for now.

D.

Weee, well todays been my first day pritty much alone to do as I please. Woke up at 9am by the postman, opened the front door to get a parcel, forgot the alarm was on…. great.

Played with ANAPOS fixed the 800ms delay on all audio playout (yay!) so BSD is still an option, I’m donating my spare 700Mhz/256Mb box to Bailrigg to be a playout box, studioa.anapos.radio.lans.ac.uk :).

I went out at 10pm to Weatherspoons to catch up with Mark, Pete Greenwood. Saw Tom Dobson, Gemma ?? and a few others. It caused me to go through all my old download CD’s and put the reasonable pictures up on my gallery.

It’s taken a while to do, but it’s done. I’m gonna go to Weatherspoons realitivly early next friday so that I can catch up with everyone. Some old crushes never die eh?

TTFN,

D.

Well my parents have finally gone on holiday to Spain for a week and a half, it leaves me the house free to just chill and program in. I can never get any work done when they are about.

So for the next week it’s ANAPOS and DALCMS. I’ve done/writen the base for the play out daemon that will sit on the studio PC’s, it mixes channels together and outputs them.

I’ve got the buffering to work and things like that, now I just need to chain it to a TCP method of filling (instead of fread()). I’m a little concern for two reasons, a) it appeared to take up 1.2% of my 2.2Ghz laptop while only mixing two channels and b) for live inputs, buffering is going to be tight, frames may have to get bigger.

DALCMS has had a bit more done to it, mainly on the database aspect and how databases are opened and handled with respect to when and what permissions can be used. More need to be done on that.

I feel alone again for another reason, mainly there’s no one here atm. Johns up in Lancaster a Bailrigg, Joy’s leavining for Ohio on the 28th and Andy’s off to Minisotta next Thursday. I really need to expand my social circle locally.

Ho hum, off to go IRC for a bit.

D.

I feel like an honouree member, John added me to the mailing lists and forum yeasturday so I could be kept aprise of events going on that may effect the POS I’m writing.

As I said before to someone, it’s kinda the student experience I never had, our university was pritty crap for that sort of stuff.

I think I’m settling down on a design now, I’m going to make the output daemons be incharge of when the audio is actually played, when they run down their buffer they will send a request to the audio source that more data is needed, and so on.

That will make the media retrieval system fairly dumb, it will just be incharge of outputting when asked to by the output daemon. It’s looking like a large amount of the ANAPOS will have to be included in one programs.

This mainly is because the playlists, media library and media retrieval are heavily interlinked. Another part of the system will have to have full control of what is going on at any time.

It would be easier just to make the entire system together as one binary (appart from input (oh yes, another little be of complexity) and output daemons). I am tempted to split it into four aspects.

Output Daemons.

Controler.

Media Retrieval (+ Analog Input).

Playlist/Media Library.

While this isn’t final, it appears to be the way that it is progressing. Hmm more decisions. I’ll get back to thinking about it.

TTFN,

P.