Note : These posts were originally posted to Patreon as a Subscriber bonus. Now that Patreon's imploding, I've decided to start reposting the contents here, instead.

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Inside Jay's Notebook - 001

When typically coding, I tend not to use pen and paper. Over the many years that I've been doing this, I've found my mind to be perfectly adequate for storing bits and pieces, and jumping between all the many random and crazy ideas that I generate.
In addition, my handwriting is absolutely bloomin' awful, and as a result anything I do tend to "jot down" tends to be plonked onto a spreadsheet somewhere, rather than onto paper.

But since around about 1999, when I headed off to college, there's been a constant notepad sat near my computer.
I've barely ever made use of it, but every so often something is important enough (or confusing enough!) that I've felt the need to jot it down.

Yesterday I took the time to photograph each and every used page of this notepad.



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I should warn you, before we begin.
1. There's not a lot in here!
2. My handwriting is atrocious!
3. This is random thoughts and ideas spanning about 2 decades. Although I haven't used it in a long long while!
4. Not even I know what half of this stuff is!
5. I haven't added dates or titles or anything remotely useful to any of these pages. Sorry in advance!


So, with that in mind, let's begin with page one!

Full Page

Right at the top, we'll kick things off with some random boxes.



There are four boxes visible. The first two appear to have inward pointing arrows, whilst the second two have outty arrows.
At some point in time, I'm sure that meant the world to me, and was incredibly important.
*shrugs*

And this is roughly how the rest of this series of posts is going to go down!!



Next up, we seem to have the beginings of an audio database of sorts.
Seems to be that I needed tracknames, keywords and descriptions for tracks.
At first I thought I might've been organising my ALChoons collection, but if it were my own tracks I wouldn't have needed an %Artist listed?
A puzzling set of data.
I'm also unsure why I used %'s for the four right-hand values. Was that a Perl thing? I can't remember.


Rotating we can see 3 numbers. 10, 7 and 3.
I'm sure I must've needed those numbers written down for a very good reason!



We continue with more fomulating of database stuff. Is this the same database, or a different one?
There are Tiles or Files? I'm guessing probably Files.
Each has a Type, and a "Sort By Number" which would nowadays be the Primary Key for an SQL Database.
Show would either show or hide whatever it is I'm storing, and as for the last two bits... My own handwriting fails me!
Perhaps this was the start of me wanting to create a database of my games, although around 1999 or thereabouts, that would be far from my mind at the time.



Next, another makeshift database, this time with a little more description in the values.
We can see that things have Filenames, Realnames and Descriptions, as well as a series of flags for various things.
I *think* this might have something to do with JNKSielts (Spinning Internet Explorer Logo Things) as there were a variety of Lemming, TV and Videogame related Sielts over the time that I ran that site.
I've also just realised that "5 Pack" in fact says "S Park" or South Park. I had a number of South Park Sielts, too!



A Sielt is the little image that used to animate in the top right of Internet Explorer. Microsoft created IE with the ability to replace the animation, so that various ISPs could customise the browser.
I used to run a site that let users download various Sielts in .exe form. They'd click the exe, it'd extract the .gif animation, and tweak IE's settings to use that .gif
It was silly, but fun, and kept me entertained during the very early days of my Internet based adventures.
There's not a lot of "Sielts" left on the internet, but there are clues if you hunt.
ArsTechnica Topic


Spinning around for some rotated number stuff.
X and Y co-ordinates seem to be being stored in a 10 character string, but below are listed A'B'C's.
I wonder what that's all about?
There are two baffling boxes with R and RH written in them.
We also have a rogue C$ floating near the bottom. We'll see C$ again in a minute.


On to the last piece of this page, and we've got C$ reappearing, along with A$ and B$
If we assume these are the same A,B,Cs from the previous image, we can imagine the three boxes are 3, 3 and 4 characters long.
The variables seem to be looped into a circle of sorts.
I have a feeling this might all be to do with the Sielts site, but having crawled through my old server files, I'm struggling to figure out how it all pieces together.
*shrugs*



Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this short journey through a single page of my Notebook.
I'll be posting more of these in the future, so be sure to let me know if you enjoyed this, or thought it a pile of garbage!