So, lately I’ve been having what I would describe as occasional bouts of depression. In general, when I’ve tried to tell anybody about this, I’ve gotten told to “stop being such a whiner” or “quit with the self pity” or similar things. What these people don’t seem to get is that if it was that easy to just switch it off, I would – I don’t really enjoy feeling these kind of emotions any more than they enjoy me complaining about it. So why do I complain about it? Well, it helps, a bit. As for why I get depressed, let me count the ways.

Most of the real-life friends I have now are people I’ve been introduced to. They’re great people, and it’s fun to do stuff with them, but sometimes I can’t help but feel isolated, even when I’m in a group with them. They all work at the same place, which is a different place from where I work, so (not unreasonably) when they meet up they tend to talk about work, which through no fault of their own kinda excludes me by definition. I understand some of what they talk about, but it’s not something I’m a part of.

Unfortunately I seem to have real difficulty connecting with people even when I do have something in common with them. Take the anime convention I just went to for example. 1200 plus people, including myself, all with an interest in anime, but I didn’t really “meet” anybody. I wish there was a “Complete Idiot’s Guide to Not Being a Wallflower at Con Parties”.

Then there’s girl trouble – or rather, lack-of-girl trouble. For the majority of my life, I’ve never had a relationship of any kind with women. There are a few women in the group of friends I have now,  but I have no idea how to tell what their relationship status is, other than the ones who are already clearly attached. And even if one of them did happen to be single, I haven’t a clue how I’d go about approaching her. Or what I’d do in the unlikely event that such an approach was successful.

This stuff never really used to be such a problem; I’ve been alone for much of my life, and while I have felt bad about it on occasion it’s affected me far less often than it does now. Maybe it’s because now I have a little bit of understanding about what’s wrong, but I feel powerless to fix it; I have to wait until I can get professional help, like therapy or something. I’ve tried to research my problems on the Internet, but it seems like my Google-fu is not strong enough to find the solution there, either.

I managed to get a referral to an Aspergers Syndrome clinic. They sent me a bunch of questionnaires to fill in, which I’ve now done and sent back to them, but their letter said it will take up to 4 months before they’re likely to offer me an appointment for an assessment. I feel like I want to be trying to do something in the interim, but I don’t really know what. Private therapy isn’t an option as I can’t afford it. Talking to friends about it… well… the end result of that was really not good the last time I tried it, and in any case I’ve realised it’s not really fair to expect people who haven’t been trained to deal with this sort of thing to be prepared to help.

So, here I am. Just waiting. Sometimes I feel okay, sometimes I don’t. Watch this space.

Bought a bunch of stuff in the dealers room at the con:

• Patlabor movies 1 and 2 limited edition double pack
• Planetes boxset
• Witch Hunter Robin boxset (boxsets were on 2 for £25 at the Beez table and I needed something to get along with Planetes)
• Aria the Animation and Aria the Natural parts 1 and 2 boxsets
• Fate/stay night boxset
• Futari H manga vols 1-4
• Xenosaga III KOS-MOS swimsuit version figure
• Demonbane Metatron figure

The Momoi Haruko concert was awesome, I’d definitely like to go to something like that again (need to remember to bring my own glowsticks next time though). The con parties were good, although they might’ve been more enjoyable for me if I’d have known any of the people there. I managed to get 3G signal with my dongle okay at the various panels I covered, so that worked out well too.

AmeCon got announced for 2010 during the closing ceremony, so now I gotta start saving up for that.

I’m quite favourably inclined towards Windows 7 so far; UAC is not gone but is far less annoying and intrusive and in fact I’ve only seen actual UAC popups a couple of times (both when trying to install software). I still see a variant version of the UAC shield, with a yellow-and-blue pattern, on some icons, but no popup appears if I click on it. Maybe that indicates it’s only restricted for limited user accounts or something? Anyway it’s a definite improvement.

The new taskbar with its large program icons feels more like something I’d expect to find in Linux (or, of course, on a Mac). Not sure whether I like it yet but it doesn’t seem bad so far.

There’s already 3 beta antivirus apps available for Windows 7, which you can get hold of by clicking the “Find a program” when the Action Centre whinges at you. Unfortunately, of the 3, one is pay-only and one is Norton, leaving the only sensible choice as Kaspersky 8 beta. It’s a little bit on the feature-packed side for my liking, but it seems decent and it stopped Windows complaining.

Windows Update is pretty much the same as Vista, with the exception that if you chose not to configure Automatic Updates during setup, you get forced to configure it here. I guess this is a good thing for regular end users, but it kind of annoyed me a bit.

The bundled accessories apps have received some upgrades; Wordpad and Paint have received an Office 2007-style facelift, and Wordpad can now open Word 2007 documents and OpenDocuments. Notepad is still the same as before, but Calculator sports new Unit Conversions and Programmer modes. Additions include Sticky Notes (which does what it says on the tin, but only in a rather basic way; I guess Microsoft don’t want to cut in on sales of OneNote) and Snipping Tool, which is a screen capture utility (though you can still use PrtSc and paste into Paint if you want to).

The sidebar is gone, but only because the entire desktop is now gadget-enabled. I’m undecided yet as to whether that’s a good thing; my problem is that any gadgets I might have on the desktop are going to get covered up by applications, and I don’t particularly want them always-on-top either. If there’s a keyboard shortcut which would toggle between bringing them to the front and sending them to the back, that might be a good compromise; I’ll have to investigate further.

Printers and Faxes has morphed into Devices and Printers; as well as printers it also currently lists my PC as a Device. I’m guessing that stuff like scanners and cameras will turn up in here as well. It claims to have some sort of method for downloading a realistic-appearing image of known devices for display in there, but I guess the list is small at the moment since it didn’t do that for the LaserJet on the network here.

I’ll post some more later if I think of anything else I want to say about the beta.

I put a new theme on my blog, since the old default blue was starting to seem really dull and boring. This one has changeable backgrounds too so I put something seasonal on for that.

As you’ll know if you’ve been following my twitter, the DHL guy is supposed to be turning up today to collect a bunch of boxes of manga which I’m shipping down to my new place, he was supposed to turn up in the morning but there’s been no sign of him so far.

• An Xbox 360 Messenger Kit
• An ATI Radeon HD 3450 graphics card (my dad found this in his wardrobe and had forgotten what we got it for; it was a spare that we were going to use while my proper graphics card was getting replaced. Not really sure what I’m going to do with it)
• A box of Cadburys Milk Tray chocolates
• 3 pairs of socks
• A mini USB hub (only USB 1.1 apparently)
• A USB SD/MMC card reader
• A sewing kit
• A 2009 calendar
• A 2009 diary
• 4Gb of RAM for my laptop

I’m going to go out to Newcastle on Saturday and go shopping. Definitely planning on getting a pay-as-you-go mobile broadband dongle to use until we get internet at the new house. I might get some other stuff as well, I haven’t decided yet.

As far as the actual job is concerned, it’s been pretty decent so far; finally managed to get all the paperwork filled in and handed in to Personnel. Got my P45 from the Jobcentre on Saturday which was a bit unexpected, they are not usually that quick about those sorts of things. The college itself is a nice place and the staff seem like nice people. They have a fairly comprehensive refectory where you can get hot food or sandwiches and snacks (I usually just pick up a sandwich and a packet of crisps for lunch).

It’s half term this week so things should be a bit easier as there are no students and fewer staff than normal, although of course this is the time when we will be trying to sort out all the things that couldn’t be sorted out when the students and teachers were in, such as machines that need reimaging or swapping out and so on.