Sunday 28 March 1999

Pic of the day: The snow is gone, the rain has taken a pause, and the sun is heating the barren earth. The first flowers timidly claim the ground for spring.

Took a long walk today, and looked at spring. The sun shone and in the end I had to take off my warm outer jacket. It was beautiful. I'm not one of those enthusiastic spring people, who go all oooh! when spring comes. But it does feel good after all the months of cold and darkness up here.

Besides a few battles in M1 Tank Platoon 2, I also visited The Weave at weave.mud.com 6060. This, you may remember, was my favorite MUD. They have improved it again. Now you are explicitly In Character (IC) or Out Of Character (OOC). This way people can see at a glance who is roleplaying and who is just leveling or otherwise having fun. Some areas are closed to the OOC crowd. Well, crowd ... This vast and exquisitely detailed game world was at that time populated by two people, including me and a newbie rooting for weapons and armor. That's a shame really. Perhaps the others too have moved to graphical MUDs like The Realm.

In the evening I got an unexpected phone call from my best friend and her charming and beautiful older sister. The sister had taken with her a floppy from somewhere and, it seems, blown the family PC to the happy hunting grounds. I generally advise against starting your PC with a floppy in it, unless said floppy is a dedicated start-up floppy that has never been used for anything else. And even then, never reboot with the floppy in. Turn off. This is the second such call I get in a month (counting my evenings only - not in work context). As the hard disk was suddenly of an invalid media type, I recommended going back to the shop with it and telling the whole story. It's sort of hard to download a floppy-based repair program when you don't even get C:\>, much less your trusty old web browser.