And that's quite enough territorial demands from the feline population for now!

The Alt Party is next week, so close that I can smell it! Or perhaps my sleeping bag needs a wash? There seems to be a lot of Atari bods going now, even some people who have never been to one of these before, and I'm also going to get to see some people I've not seen in the flesh for years (Hi Evil! It was the last Error in Line I believe?) There has even been some Atari related code made for it, with a neat invitro from Paradox as evidenced by the sepia-toned screenshot below. There may be the slightest possibility of something appearing at the party itself, but we'll see!



I'll be back in the aftermath period, so see you all later...

Choose to catch something that gets all your attention for the next four weeks. Choose to watch everyone else get it as well. Choose to pick up an opportunistic successor infection whilst your immune system is still knackered from the first one. Choose to cough up copious amounts of lung snot at night. Choose your future. Choose life. But why would I want to do a thing like that? Ahh, I did! I made my coughy fevered bed, so I have to lie in it. - With some sort of apology to Irvine Welsh, I guess.

A surprise update leaps in, as a slow recovery from the 'thing' mentioned last time is interrupted by a fellow-travelling virus, even before the after-effects of the other one have completely gone. So it's occasional outbreaks of a coughing apocalypse, dizzy spells and headaches, not to mention the lung snot I mentioned before. It'll get better, one day....

In other news, a mobycam grab which was going to feature in this update had an unexpected promotion to the pages of the leading satirical mag, 'Private Eye'. It can be found at the bottom of page 24 (Literary review aka 'Bookworm') in issue 1219, the current one on sale at time of updating this entry.

It's been a while, so a big update is due. Since the last time, The first thing that happened in June was something of extreme shittiness, as Molly, the dafter and more openly affectionate member of the family feline menagerie died. She had been losing weight for some months beforehand. An initial vets visit gave us some early hope that this was due to an easily controllable (by drugs) hyperactive thyroid gland. But a few more weeks later and it became apparent there was something else going on as well which was killing off her red blood cells and ultimately that was the end. The vets were very good, and tried to do everything they could to help her. Here's a picture of how I prefer to remember her. Molly, you were a silly cat, but very loving, you will be missed.



Molly being mobycammed, wants to see what's going on..                                                         Meanwhile, Cloe sees no evil whatsover...

The feline tribute page will get the usual update soon. The other cat Cloe is still very much alive and healthy, and seems to have expanded her normally quiet and sensible personality to fill some of the space left by Molly pretty well. If it goes much further, we may be talking in terms of some kind of after-life possession by Molly?!

Of more general and less dismal matters, Nicky and I did something completely different for our summer holiday, namely avoiding the sunnier parts of the world and going to Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, a known sun-dodging country! Well we managed to carve out a good time there, having the use of a comfortable apartment near the city centre in one of the 'antique' districts of Edinburgh free of charge as it was provided by a family member of Nicky's was a good start. We managed to take in a number of the sights, including the zoo and the castle, pictures are attached below.

Here's a recipe for Scottish-style artery-killer cheeseburgers, this was picked up from our local chippy, which is a tourist recommended place, and seems to be a joint Italian-Lithuanian operation.

1. Everyone else's cheeseburgers, processed cheese slice and meat in a bun with salad, garnish, McDonalds stylee, whatever...
2. Scottish style, take one processed cheese slice, place on top of a frozen burger, dip in batter and deep-fry! Enjoy, and die!


 
Gunners-eye view from the castle looking down to the city centre..                                             Rhino-plasty at the zoo!

As for the rest of it, I've finished my Alive 15 stuff, but no-one else did, so there was not a release at the Evoke Party after all. Gives me time to add some more stuff at least. I'm also experimenting with adding a compact flash as a replacement hard drive to my CT60 with (so far) partial success. This works perfectly well in normal Falcon 030 mode, but does not want to know when running as a CT60. There remains a definite question mark over the health of the current 'Travelstar' IBM IDE internal drive (known as 'Deathstar' for its reliability in certain quarters!) and I'm not totally sure there isn't an issue developing with the CT60 itself, or the area around the expansion port as it does not like to boot sometimes, and randomly freezes at other times? I suspect an upgrade of my HD-Driver version might help with the CF problem at least, more later, as they say.

August was dominated by some strange lurgey type thing which gave me, and a lot of other people at work, the cough from hell. It's been about four weeks. In keeping with the brief and terse style of this miniblog, I'll gloss over the sleepless nights, interrupted sleep when able to sleep, the coughing and choking fits that result in out of body experiences, and a general malaise where your horizons shrink to just getting through the next few minutes. Still, I'm getting over it now.

I ought to be updating the Geek pages too, as I've got a new addition to my hardware family. This is a laptop, a Dell Latitude D610, not the Asus EE-PC or Advent sub-notebook I envisioned getting at the start of the summer. The reason for that is that the Dell comes as a secondhand machine, courtesy of Felice's current place of employment, COMPLETELY FREE OF CHARGE! As a two year old lappy of a good spec, it is more than an adequate addition to the family. It might need a bit of money spending on it, as in needing a replacement for the rather worn battery, but it is still a major bargain even with that. It will be replacing the old Compaq tower, and the space where that currently goes will ultimately see the rehoming of Kev 'Taff' Davies Milan '040 into it, whenever he finally manages to get that to me?!

Ok, all for now, the brand new and revamped Alt Party, is coming up at the end of October, we're all ready for it. Might get an update in before then, if not, then you'll hear all about it next time!

Outline '08, we're back from Outline! It was the best one yet. I guess I wasn't the only person missing out from last year. Most of the usual suspects were there, even some, like Sh3 and MSG, who made a special last minute trip to get there. Of the rest, I'm sure we'll be back for next year, as it is better than 99% certain that we will get another edition next year.

The competitions came back to a more active focus and a higher standard than in the last year or so. Apart from three proper and decent demo entries from Checkpoint,  Paradox, and a combined Lineout and RG team, there was also a fake (cough!) entry from some other people. We also only just missed out on a new CT60 demo and (Falcon?) 4ktro from Mikro as well, and I'm pretty sure that there were a couple of other might-have-beens still awaiting their chance at some future date. So not quite a Fried Bits or Error in Line vintage, but close enough.

Although using the tried and trusted car/skipful of retro-computery stuff in the boot combo, we varied our route this year, to the party place at Teh Boemsgoed, made famous or notorious by the 2005 Outline party. Instead of taking the ferry from Harwich (aka 'Toilet by Sea') to the Hoek van Holland, we opted for a swift dose of the Channel Tunnel instead. The reason for this was mainly due to the convenient and fast Stena Discovery being pulled from the route and replaced by a slower ship instead. The Eurotunnel was fast and handy, even allowing you to take an earlier train if you were early, which we did. Apart from there being more driving in general, we still shaved a couple of hours off our normal trip timing.

Here's a couple of pictures from the party. A full report will appear in the next edition of Alive Magazine, which will be due for an August release.

 

                      The partyhall, complete with Atari banner.                                                                                     Felice and Earx in a coke-drinking live act watching pose!

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I-i-i-i-t's Xmuss! So in the immortal words of Slade, we are staring down the barrel of another festive season. The knee-op thing didn't take place on the 17th December due to a variety of reasons, not least of which was one of the surgeon's family members experiencing a medical emergency all of their very own which forced a sudden cancellation. This is now due to go ahead for the 28th, so at least we get a normal Xmas before the knee-challenged party is whisked off for another hopefully more successful attempt.

You might be interested to know that I managed to get my hands on the rarer than plutonium Nintendo DS in the end. Amazingly it was from the retail shed of someone with whom I had dealings with a long long time ago, back in the Wellingborough computer club days in the early to mid-nineties. This was none other than the man who once had a £499 1MB Atari Falcon on sale for five years without ever selling it, give it up for Ralph Kotecha! You da man! I guess that his relatively hidden location meant he was able to keep hold of his stock just a litle bit longer than anyone else.

I'm off work right until the new year now, so time to put my feet up a bit. Here's a couple of miscellaneous cat pictures that I took today with the mobycam.



Molly wants to have a go on my Mini-Mac! Or is it just the mouse she is interested in?            Cloe narrowly avoids being wrapped up in Xmas paper and getting stuffed under the tree!

I suppose I ought to be doing a litle bit of something creative and possibly Atariscene related in the following days, I guess I'm waiting for the boredom to hit properly. Just give it a couple of days then we'll see! Anyways, merry Xmas, Joyeux Noel, and whatever the Swedish greeting might be (May all your reindeer be nice and tight?!) See you all in the new year. Yo, 2008, I'm talkin' to YOU, sucker!

Here we go, it's knee-replacement, episode deux folks!

The 'sort of Novemberish' speculation, a couple or so entries ago actually turned into the 17th December, where we were hoping for 'sort of January' instead. I guess that orthopaedic surgeons want to get in a bit of overtime to squeeze some cash for that last minute Xmas bargain? It is going to make Xmas itself interesting, at least the affected party will be out of hospital before the 25th, but no vigorous dance-based party games are allowed! Also the depth and quality of my New Years celebrations might well take a hit, typical, just when I managed to actually book the time off I wanted for a change!

Still waiting for Milan '040, no hurry Kev, I'm infinitely patient!

Of other tech toys, I'm on the never-ending Nintendo Xmas quest, in this case, not for the Wii, which is rarer than an unsecured weapons-grade plutonium stockpile, but for the nearly as unavailable Nintendo DS. In the very few places where they are on sale, the retail trade insist on 'bundling' them with not particularly attractive games for the late middle-aged demographic I'm buying the DS for. Just when Nintendo deserve a cheer for finally starting to break away from their over-specific age-related niche marketing, the retail and distribution trade come over all dinosaurish and insist on foisting full-price copies of "Barbie Doll Attack" and "Bratz Cannibal Holocaust" on everybody! (Rant mode off.) I'll try to get a further update in around Xmas, and let you know how that all went in the end.

Still on tech toys, and whilst on the premises of 'Toys-R-Us' (ugh!) I spotted a minature laptop, which upon closer examination, was not one of those fake kiddy laptop early learning toys, but was an actual real laptop, about half the size of the traditional chunky square flat Windowze-driven room-heaters we all know and love. Upon even closer examination, it appears to be very close to this machine with it's hardware spec. Also it appears to be running some form of Linux, features Mozilla Thunderbird as the in-box browser, has wi-fi and a camera built in. I didn't linger too long, but if it is not actually a direct knock-off of the OLPC, it seems to be very closely "inspired" by it. Remembering what I was really there for, I restrained my hand from going for the credit card...

 A quick couple of mobycam pictures to brighten up an otherwise dull entry.

There have been many statements made by famous people, whose words reach down the ages in such a profound manner, that their meaning remains powerfully timeless even to this day.

Off the top of my head, I can think of words like "The eagle has landed" - Neil Armstrong. Or perhaps "I have a dream" - Martin Luther King, or even "Get out of yo' bed and do something, yo' lazy child!" (Martin Luther King's mother.) We're not forgetting Adolf Hitler's final Berlin bunker utterance, in the dying days of the 3rd Reich. "Eva, ven I'm dead und gone, who vill look affter mein cuddly toy froggie Humfrey?!" (You made that last one up, didn't you, CiH, you git!)

Well it is time to add some more famous words of huge consequence to the record books, as I will now say that "FELICE HAS GOT MARRIED!"

I'm now talking about the New York trip in a past tense, and Felice was forced into his best suit at gunpoint (well, an electric shaver in plastic bag disguised to look like a gun), and driven in company with myself by a maniac Yellow cab driver to the Empire State building, and the deed was done on the 55th floor of said building, when the stretch limo bringing the female half of this famous marital glueing-together managed to force its way through the NY traffic, ten minutes late. So congratulations to Miss Paula Thomas, who is now Mrs Paula Spowart, or is it Felice is now Mr Paula Thomas? I get so easily confused these days? I nearly forgot, Nicky came out with us as well, and did a nice job as bridesmaid. I think Felice appreciated my best man's speech detailing some of his more memorable past exploits, the other family members certainly did!

I have got pictorial proof, lots and lots of pictures, so I'll see if I can pop something suitable onto these pages.

The rest of the NY trip was brilliant, but one thing I didn't manage a lot of was rest and recreation, it really isn't that sort of place. I am still having moments of brain-spazzing tiredness, but most of that is now down to the back to work vibe. At time of writing, the happy couple are still in the States, currently dodging Californian wildfires in Anaheim, but they should be back with us soon. I have another picture I'll share with you, where Felice got ambushed by a mad street rapper when we were waiting in the Times Square queue to join the open-topped tour buses.

There's a new widget in my life which turned up just a week or so ago. This is a storage device for my 'humble' Atari ST which uses SD-Ram cards as a replacement for those bulky mechanical (and hard to get these days) ASCSI hard drives for the ST. It goes under the moniker of "Satandisk", but not for any sinister occult reasons, I might add! This arrival is down to a small group of talented Slovakians, and we only had to wait six months to get it, which is a vanishingly short time in Atari hardware development terms. (Not mentioning all the work done beforehand though!) It really shows how far hardware has come in twenty years, where a hard drive enclosure which took up a fair chunk of coffee-table real-estate in olden tymes, has now reduced to a little box a few centimetres cubed. Cool or what?!

The beauty of SD-cards, apart from their smallness and cheapness, is that you can format for dual PeeCee/Atari compatibility, and with a suitable card reader for the PeeCee, you can transfer back and forth between the two machines without any hassles. It makes bulk transfers between the two a breeze, and also backing up your ST's data onto the dubious safety of another machine's hard drive is an option! Satandisk then also works pretty well as a hard drive for the ST in its own right too.

(You notice I mention 'PeeCee' more than a few times without mentioning the word "Mac". Well I found that OS X can read such a card, it can also transfer files to it, but then tends to add a lot of 'hidden' files of its own, which do naughty things to the card to stop it being read again by the ST!) So I'm using the old Compaq machine as a go-between, which is much better all round.)

I was one of the lucky people who got an early Beta test version of it. At the moment, it is sporting a 256 mb Kingston SD card as my ST-hard drive. Apart from one or two user-made cock-ups, I've managed to get on fine with it. I also took some pictures of Satandisk in operation to share around, so here they are.

Here's a little demoscreen running, actually the front end of a Dbug menu.



A very early desktop showing Satandisk in operation, the coloured icons aren't from my STe running Falcon TOS, but are
due to a neat little program which give coloured icons to a low-res STe TOS desktop.



This is more like it, a more 'matured' desktop, running TOS 2.06, a logical filing arrangement, and a growing pile of files
on the disk as well. One feature of having a dual ST/PeeCee compatible medium, is that you can only have a single
partition. Hence the fact that everything is drive c:\

In other news, mother finally got her knee-op date, which is about two or three days from now! Which is where life gets interesting, as I will be relocating there for a bit. I should be able to carry on at least some normal activities, as I'm bringing this machine over with me. Apart from that, not a lot else to tell really, so see you all again later.

I guess we're overdue for an update here. I've been slack, and lacking motivation as my major 'creativity anchor-point', the traditional Easter/Spring Atari coding party had been unattainable for this year. We're still waiting on the knee-replacement op thing that I mentioned last time. By the time it was safe to consider the Outline trip, there was no time available at work to book off anymore! So my life is still on the pause button and I'm a little pissed off with that. It also seems that not a lot else is currently going on elsewhere, and people are generally slack, demotivated, and all-consumed with the nine-to-five grind to do anything interesting recently. On the brighter side, we're booked up for New York in the Autumn. Maybe it was a good job we didn't get to Outline, as it looks like New York will be the monster that eats all the travel budget for this year!

Of possible future interest, The Sundown Party in September, which is that rarest of things, a UK-based demo party, down in the sunny Southwest (Budleigh Salterton to be precise!) This is not specifically an Atari party, but we will see if we can get a grey Fuji-shaped machine in there this time? Also, it looks like there are possible stirrings to new life for the ALT Party concept, after a couple of years absence.

I forget to mention before, I picked up an Amiga A1200 some time ago, mainly as a curiousity/gaming rig, but with half an eye on getting a semi-decent accelerator card for the many demo's for it. I'll have to update the geek page at some point soon.

There is at least one strange picture to close with, here it is!

Not much to report for this month, mainly settling into the new job. I now say "CPW" unselfconsciously in casual conversations with people, "CPW" being the abbreviated term for 'Carphone Warehouse'. I think there were other things that I took away from the training as well ;-) Generally things have been very quiet over the last few weeks, but it looks like my social calender is kicking into a higher gear soon, especially at weekends, and at a time when it is by no means guaranteed I can have all my weekends off anymore! Ho-hum...

 There was one thing I got through my email, which I thought I'd share with you all. This is a so-called "FRAUD ALERT!!!" email, which only served to alert me to the fact that whilst fuckwits can use computers in general, and do a fair job of copying and pasting, it's the fine details that let them down! Just take a look at the grab (Fake link to phishville mercifully removed, and the extra comments are mine, done in a Pouetized style of course.)

Time to catch up on the last couple of months, it has been mostly good news, or at least if there was some less good news, it managed to come with a silver lining hidden in its baggy pockets.

Firstly, I've got a new permanent job starting in September. It is with a national broadband provider, (I'm not going to say who, but UK readers can think "Mowbli" and make an informed guess!) It does provide a significant upgrade to my salary and benefits package over the last job, let alone the (bare) survival rates that I'm currently temping on. So as you can deduce, I'm quite pleased with that development!

Secondly, I've got a new(er) car which replaced my faithful but shagged out Fiat. This chose to stop being able to go around corners, which mitigates heavily against its continued usefulness. Unfortunately, it is old enough for 'official' parts for a new steering column and ignition system to not exist anymore, which would mean hunting in scrapyards at the dead of night, at which point I decided it could become a spares donor itself! The new model is, erm, another Fiat, but one which is a lot less knackered, and came to me courtesy of a nice man at the council who needed something bigger. It's very reasonably priced for what it is as well. As I was sort of half-thinking of changing vehicles anyway, it was a fair result all round.

A holiday in Turkey with the fair Nicky got in there for July, luckily a while before the 'War on Terror' panic mode kicked in, and they started searching inside people's bottoms at airports for hidden explosives! There is a hilarious holiday photo, which will follow shortly, but needless to say, it redefines the whole concept of holiday souvenirs! It was taken on a boat trip along with a bunch or other more or less normal pictures by a Turkish holiday-bothering paparazzi dude.

And there has been more Atari scene activity, with a stunner of a full sized demo called "Derealization" for the CT60 (Falcon '060) by The Dead Hackers Society to round up a very satisfactory few months. Oh, and  Alive mag has released its thirteenth issue! It was worth the work, even the stuff which was done under a deadline in the middle of a heatwave. Time for some eye candy perhaps?

 

   

    

I won't go into huge detail, as there is a report pending for the Alive diskmag, which will do that, but needless to say, we had a great time there, and I even managed to do some work beforehand, in connection with another part of this website, the part which featured that lame 'Rainbow' themed slideshow in fact. This is another reason why general website updates have been missing these past few weeks. But instead, you have been invited to "Dreme of Atari!"

   

Ferlease feels the rough end of a boozy evening!

Which reminds me, I've got to update that part of the site shortly as well. Never-ending round of work here!

In other news, well not a great deal else. I ought to get on with some diskmag stuff, as deadlines are fast approaching, and then there is the little matter of yet another summer holiday to enjoy with the lovely Nicky.

So it might be a few more weeks before I'm back again, so talk amongst yourselves for a bit...

I guess I will still handbuild some of my stuff, but this is going to be VERY useful for those pages which need fairly frequent maintenance, like this one! The intention was always to move my web-building onto the Mac, to make use of the better tools and resources there, but keep the other "creative" projects on my Atari setup. Now we're getting closer to that reality, with recent updates to parts of the site, including a brand new emulation resources sub-site on my NTL webspace.

So what has happened in the past two years, grasshopper?

Well as a long-time Atari demoscene botherer, it's been a mostly quiet couple of years. There's been no great breakthrough for the CT60 as yet. There have been some bits and pieces, glimpsed promises of greater things, but no grandstanding megademo's as yet. if anything, the humbler members of the Atari ST family have been getting more of an intensive workout, with the superlative  "Beams" demo for the Falcon, and a timely 20th anniversary tribute megademo for the ST. Anyway, you can get a good idea of what has transpired in that area, from my screengrab gallery.

My diskmag activities continue apace, the Alive diskmag is still going. We're up to issue 12. There was a fairly major editor change from STS to Cyclone for issue 9, but the mag continued unscathed. There has also been some involvement with other publications such as 'Chosneck' and even a few articles for the PeeCee diskmag ''Hugi' .

Nicky, who has been mentioned more than once in the old news pages is still around but we're just friends, albeit very good ones.



Ironic really, she hates being photographed, and this is quite a good one from a holiday last year in Turkey..

There was some shit stuff to cover briefly here. Dad died of complications from advanced stages of Prostate cancer in the summer of 2004. It was NOT a nice year!

The cats are happily unchanged from when I last updated that page. Molly is exactly the same as before, but Cloe is getting a bit more assertive and revealing a mischievous personality!

The 'rush to broadband' led me to take up the Mac Mini. I've also thrown some more cash on the CT60 Falcon, with that machine enhanced further, with un upgraded cpu, a revision-6 68060, capable in theory of up to 100 mhz, (but not quite in practice), and a CTCM control module, so you can tweak the cpu speed on the fly! We are still awaiting the Ethernat USB/Ethernet card, and there are two proposals for graphics cards add-ons as well.

I've started an occasional Ebay habit, and in a triumph of commonsense over infinite wealth, managed to win an Enterprise 64, the foolishly given-away computer of my youth. I will be getting an old PeeCee (shame!) to run the E64/128 emulations. There is a crazy long-term plan to start coding for the soundchip on that machine, to raise its profile on the retro-chip music scene.

Generally, I'm in the same job and living situation as two years ago. I'm too comfortable I guess? it's horrible how time drifts so easily..