The Inner Circle

I wrote a rather long piece of friendship a week ago and how friendships are formed. I’ve gotten to know someone over the past three days, and as odd as it is I like them much and consider them a friend.

I write this now, because three days ago, once again an IRC person tried to be my friend instantly and has tried over the past three days to get into my good graces.

I guess I just thought it was ironic that while the former wasn’t forced it worked, yet the forced attempt failed. I guess as a message to all the DALnet users who might be reading this, learn, if you come up to me and just ask for stats form me (asl, what I do, etc) and other things, that isn’t building a friendship.

Generally talking about a common intrest point does slowly, I’m not interested in just knowing every fact about your second cousins wifes sister, trust me. Yes if it comes up in natural conversation (as things do with friends) then that’s fine.

But come on, I really don’t want to know, I’m not opposed to meeting new people of any race or culture (for recently I have been accused of being racest, something I took great offense too).

Come on folks, just try to understand.

For information I’ve imported all my blogs back from May 2001 to when this blog started. Click on the blog contents link in the contents pane to read them!

I haven’t written in here for a few days and after being subconsiously prompted by Sara I will.

What’s been happening? Not much really, I’ve been working on ANRPOS as usual, I’ve so screwed a part of that up. I’ve had control and audio data flowing down the same TCP channel in the same packet structure.

That doesn’t work for the input_oss plug in, the memory allocation/deallocation just isn’t good for it. So I’ve decided to seperate things. I’m moving the control protocol back to something that resembles IRC protocol (it’s simple and addressable) and moving the audio to a frame based UDP or TCP connection in a fixed size packet.

Why fixed size? It means I can malloc a shared stack of these structures at the start of the program and just keep reusing them, and passing them around into functions, so essentially there’s only ever one memcpy, as it comes in.

On a radio note I spent Monday up in Lancaster which was fun as always, didn’t get to leave until 2:15am as I spent time getting the temporary night sustain running as ANRPOS is again delayed.

Andy and I spent an hour getting the volume levels right, bloody standards, there are to many… What did Tannenbaum say “the nice thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from”.

On another radio note, I was shocked and sadden by the news yeasturday of the death of John Peel the last remaining DJ from the original Radio 1 line up. He was essentially single handedly responcible for the shape UK music took. In some respects (at least to me) that Bailrigg kinda follows what he did, exposing new music. It’s very sad, and I found it very much in my thoughts on yeasturday.

Whatelse, I’m still jobless, there’s a suprise. I’ve got my Jobseekers Allowance meeting tomorrow. I’m guessing I’m gonna have to get some temporary Christmas work to survive.

My parrents are going away for a week this weekend, so I think I’m going to take the opertunity to go up to Lancaster for a week and spent some time there. The rabbits going to it’s animal hotel things anyway, so I’ll be free to.

Well that’s about it for now.

P.

Well, it’s been a few days since I’ve written here. I’ve not been overly busy, I’ve just not had much new to write about. I’m still unemployeed, I feel it’s my lack of expereince that’s the killer.

I understand it’s all potential employers really have to go on, but I wish there was another way that they could give you a chance.

Ho hum, unless I get something promising in the next few weeks I will have to start to look for work that does not require the skills of my degree, at least over Christmas.

ANRPOS is coming along nicly, I’m writing the routines that control audio flow between input and output modules, as well as writing code to process stereo/mono audio in the line input module. It’d be nice to have some form of compresser option in there, but that’s not requrired.

The legacy known as DALCMS has been put down, well in a manner. We’re moving the goal posts. We’ve now decided to produce DAF (DALnet Application Framework), it’s a more simplistic approach, it’s a solid base that we can add modules (like a CMS, Users website, massads) into. It’s not to dissimilar to the concept of Horde and IMP.

Moving off that, I’ve descovered that www-cache.lancs.ac.uk was infact Jonathon from Bailrigg FM, I like knowing who my visitors are. You may have noticed at the bottom boarder it displays your IP, it will also attempt to find out your IP address if you are behind a HTTP proxy.

Which brings me onto a new mystery guest… Who are you person comming from Synectics Solutions Ltd in Newcastle, Staffordshire? Come on, comment, I’m not mad, I’d just like to know…. Stubbs? Lloyd? That you?

TTFN,

D.

What is friendship?

In my online career I have come accross a lot of people who claimed to be my friend, or who wanted to be my friend. Why did these people want to be my friend? I don’t really know, probably just to name drop, or to think their gonna get somewhere.

To alter something that was said by Wolf in Star Trek : First Contact, “Friendship is earnt, not given away”. I believe this implicitly, if I meet someone in real life, it takes a while before I’d consider them a friend. In the mean time they are mearly an aquaintance.

Sure some people you work with, or spend a lot of time with over a few days probably become your friends very quickly, over that period of time. For example the majority of people at Bailrigg FM, I’ve only spent 3-4 days with a lot of them, but over thoose days been with them a lot. So people like Ali and Andy become friends.

What gets me is on the internet, a person wants to become your friend… I don’t get that. Friendships form overtime, they can’t be forced. I could list countless examples of people who I have just gotten to know over the years, Shariar^, Wagahai, Tashie, Daonie (god old nick eh? :), Quension, MSofty, Wisdom.

I’ve worked with all thoose people, we didn’t start off as friends, we either started off just chatting in an IRC channel, or we worked together and a friendship has formed.

Maybe Wagahai is the prime example of that, I met him when I joined the DALnet webteam for the very first time, I didn’t know him, I simply had to work with him to do the DALnet site. He was just another person (okey, I’m running far away from San Diego as I write this ;).

But over time, and I’m not sure even how, we’ve become friends, better friends, good friends, and today I hold Aaron as one of my best friends. I wont say love (’cos males can’t) but we have an extreamly strong “male bond”.

People who come up to me and immediatly say ASL, and want to know details about me, I don’t get. That’s not friendship really. Friendships can’t be forced, they just happen. It’s chemistry, just in the same way that love works, it can’t be forced, it just happens.

I’ve worked with a lot of people, online and in a real work enviroment, I know a lot of people, but I don’t class all of thoose people as friends. I just know them.

This is probably just a rant, but one I feel was worth making,

D.