Personal: Sleep, Soccer and Storage Space

Yawn! I haven’t long woken up from a really long sleep – just about 18 hours. I haven’t slept for so long for ages, but I guess with only getting 4 hours sleep on Friday night, I needed to catch up. I was working on a new website until around 6am Saturday morning: ok, ok, it was the “Guess That Movie” website – the design is already looking quite nifty (it looks like its a framed based site, but it isn’t), the database design has been finalised and nearly all the main graphics have been designed (ok, there’s only going to be two graphics and I’ve done one of them: but 50% is nearly ‘all’ isn’t it? 🙂 ).

I must admit, however, that I did have a really funny dream. I usually have semi horror-movie, sci-fiish or, at least, “likely to happen” type dreams but last night’s was just “totally out there”.

I dreamt, that for some reason, I had instantly been selected to play in the English football (soccer) team in a very important match. And, like in real life, I wasn’t a footballer. So the match comes around and, being a defender, I managed to stop the “game deciding” goal from getting in my just running behind our goal keeper (who was just outside the box) and header-ing the ball from behind him into his hands. Since I was only playing for the one game, at the end I went back to “real life” and found myself in a pub talking about the game – several people didn’t believe the fact that “yes, I was the one that saved that goal” and so I had to get the pub manager to play the game again on the TV and at the important part I pointed out where I saved the goal and did a little celebration thingy in Richy style… They then started to believe me and buy me drinks.

The only possible thing that I can think of that might have sparked that freaky strange dream is the fact that Leicester City Football Club (“The Foxes”) somehow managed to let Wolverhampton Wanders (“Wolves” aka “The Doritos Cheesy Team”) beat them 4-1 in the fourth of the FA Cup. But considering LCFC is currently in “administration” because of previous financial difficulties, have a large number of injured players (striker Brian Deane has a fractured cheekbone and Trevor Benjamin and James Scowcroft are also unavilable due to injuries) and because of the “no player transfers whilst a club is in administration” rule have been unable to get “fresh” players – I’ll let them off these once.

The reason why I didn’t sleep in on Saturday morning was because of my father. He called and asked if I would like to “pop round” to my parents house (I thought, yeah, why not – I haven’t been round there since Boxing Day). So he picked me up and went back to his around 11 o’clock in the morning. On the way there, he told me my Mum was working that day and wouldn’t be back until around 8.30pm but that she did want to see me. Hence I was going to be “stuck there” for around 9 hours.

We watched Scary Movie 2 (which, incidentally, was the movie I took image 4 from for the “Guess That Movie” competition) and I laughed quite a bit at it. It’s got it’s funny moments but it was “The Professor” that started me laughing. Tim Curry plays “The Professor” in the movie, but if you have ever watched the movie “The Worst Witch” you would have seen him playing “The Grand Wizard” in it. Now try and imagine the Grand Wizard being The Professor who wants to observe peoples reactions in a haunted house. It doesn’t quite “go” does it.

I then then helped him understand Norton Antivirus a bit more on his PC (Windows ME though – yuck! I have tried upgrading him to Windows 2000 but because it was a “Staples Cheapo” PC, there’s a lot of incompatible hardware that makes the upgrade nearly impossible) and then showed him the latest “Guess That Movie” image. He didn’t recognise it either, but when I told him which movie it was he looked at it again and said “Yes, I do recognise — — on the left”. He then had a rest whilst I went on the internet via his machine. I’m more used to a 512k ADSL link at a minimum (at work I think we’ve got a 2Mb link and my previous employer had ‘ridiculous connectivity’ of, IIRC, 2x14Mb links) – he’s still only got a 56k soft-modem dialup connection. Considering I started using the internet just as 33.6Kbps modems were coming out (I actually think it might have been before then – I’ve already forgotten how many modems I’ve got through), I should be more “conditioned” to slow browsing – but obviously not…

I managed to make a blog entry though (mainly to get a bit of irritation off my chest), but because I didn’t have access to my photo editing software nor a decent internet link, I couldn’t make a little icon/image to it until I got home. I did read about the MS-SQL server problem that was plaguing the internet and I’m planning on writing my own coverage of it RSN (Real Soon Now). Because of the general internet slowness caused by the MS-SQL server worm and a 56k dial up link, there wasn’t much net related activity I could really do (hence the lack of blog entries yesterday).

My Mum came home and we had a chat, then my Dad broke the bombshell that I was supposedly staying the night. It was news to me (and my Mum!). I said that I had plenty to do at home (my plan was actually to vacuum wash the carpets over this weekend, but now that plan has totally gone out the window – it looks like next weekend will have to be tidying the house and vacuum washing), but he said it was too late for me to go back now and anyway he was too tired to take me (he was just heading up to bed) and my Mum had just got back and was too tired to take me home as well.

After he had gone up to bed, I talked with my Mum a bit more (and read a few more magazines) I started to get ready to go home. I thought that I could walk into the next village, grab some cash from a cash machine (aka an ATM – Automatic Teller Machine) and then grab a taxi home. But my dear sweet mother said she’ll take me home – which, bless her heart, she did. I got home around 11pm and after reading a bit fell into a nice long slumber…

When I eventually woke up (around 5.30pm) I checked my computer. When I left for my parents yesterday morning, I had around 4Gb of hard disc space free and a number of downloads running. When I woke up, I was down to around 40Mb of space *gulp*. I stopped the downloads and I’ve been burning stuff to CDs ever since – I’ve now got 3.5Gb free on my hard discs, but I’m still burning… I really need to consider getting a DVD writer as soon as I can afford one. The reason for the downloads is mainly for the Guess That Movie site. I’m trying to automate various sections of it and hence I need a largish database behind it- hence I need a large data set to start with. Unfortunately the data sets available, even when compressed, are extremely large – I’ve got to download them, extract the data, parse it and then feed in to the database system…

We’ll see how things go though.