Not much to say really other than at last we’ve got to the end of the prosecution’s part and are now on the defence side.

I guess this trial will go on and on and on….

Oh well, back into the court room at 10am again tomorrow.

Well, the weekend was nothing really special.

Saturday was taken up buying some new towels and an umbrella. Exciting, eh? Well, I also did the weekly shopping. I also got to watch “The Sky at Night” and spent the evening watching “Dirty Harry” on DVD.

Sunday was spent clearing up the spare room in preparation for Em and Jerry’s visit on Friday. I also tested that the new bed linen would fit the new sofa bed.. which it did.

The afternoon included watching the Grand Prix which was better than last year’s but probably only due to Ferrari’s ineptitude rather than the changes to the rules.

Late in the evening Alec dropped around to pick up a tape of Buffy & Angel from the Thursday he missed due to flying out to Denver. We had a good chat and mugs of tea. Well, on Alec’s part it was more of a whisper than a chat has he has a rather nasty case of larengitis.

Today has not been such an eventful day in court. We have almost got through to the end of the case for the prosecution. It was mostly statements being read and police officers giving evidence.

OK.. all I will say about today is that I learnt one big lesson:-

If ever something illegal happens, look the other way and don’t become a witness!

One of the witnesses today who was being as helpful as possible and detailing precisely what he did see, what he didn’t see and what he wasn’t sure about was attacked by one of the defence lawyers who tried to discredit his whole evidence because the poor person got one thing mixed up. To me this was just not right and put me off every trying to help in future. It’s fine to question and probe the validity of a witness’ statement and evidence but not to this degree when it was was obvious he was trying his best to help. I was appalled.

Well, after getting to the courts at the correct time, 10:25am we 12 jurors sat around for another hour and a bit twiddling thumbs whilst certain things we can’t know about happened.

Anyway, we did get into court before lunch and witnessed the defence lawyers pull the witless witness’ story apart. I half felt for the fella. But only half. The second witness of the day, in the afternoon was far brighter.

It was fun watching the defence lawyers stalking their prey and ripping them to shreds. It was almost like watching Wildlife on One and the lawyers were a pride of lions eyeing up the wilderbeast.

I’m afraid this is all the detail I’m going to go into. I’m not going to say if I ultimately believe anything the witnesses said or not. etc.

Anyway, we all got out of the court at about 4pm.

As we left, we saw on the corner of the road that there was a bit of an accident. It wasn’t until we got a bit closer did we find that it was a coach which had run over a bicycle.. it looked a mess.. I tried not to look. 🙁

One of the other jurors said, “Oh, not another one. The same thing happened only a couple of weeks ago.”

Well, that’s enough of today. I’m back at home writing this on my laptop waiting for the news to come on at 6pm. This evening’s delights include cooking two bits of pork, eating one of them and watching Buffy and Angel on Sky One.

Oh, and if you’re reading this, Alec, I taped last weeks as you requested and have it on an SVHS tape.

Well, I’ve been picked for a jury! Yippee.

The case is likely to take 10 days, which is fine.

It’s a case about a bar brawl caused by a cat fight which went a bit out of hand.. and I can and will say no more than that.

At least I’m out of pergatory.

I can tell you all about this as I’ve not actually become a juror in a case yet… Read on…

Well, I can sum things up with a description one of the other potential jurors said..

    It’s like a game of snakes and ladders.

Well, what he was talking about was the way that no-one seems to get to the
point where they become a juror. Lots of people get to a certain point up
the board before the bit reset button happens and you’re back to stage one
again, sitting pergatory awaiting the call for higher things.

My case in point today was sitting around until 10:30 when I was told, along
with 14 other people that I’d been picked for a trial in court 3 this afternoon
and that I could go awya and come back at 13:45. That all sounded promising.

At 1:45 I sit down, read my book again. 2:30, the court usher for court 3
comes in and says that “as you all know already, the jury for court 3 has
been changed and some of you have been told you can go home. ” At which point
there was a general reply of “Oh no we haven’t.” At which point the usher
appologies and says that she’d been told that we’d been informed just after
2pm and she’d find out what was going on.

Anyway, at about 2:50 one of the court officers comes in and appologies and
says that those who were picked this morning can all go home as we’re not
needed, other than 4 volunteers which are needed for stand-by. Three silly
people volunteer and another is volunteered… I go.

Exciting, eh?

Well, I’ve finished the first book. I’ll find another to take tomorrow.

GAN:
“Look, we only need the hand.” —

People are intimidated by your exterior. You’re
not above using this to your advantage, but you
couldn’t hurt a fly. Not anymore, anyway.
You’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer,
but you stick to your friends.

Which Season One Blakes 7 Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

Yesterday I planned to clear up, wash the car and a number of other little things.

Well, I managed a little bit of the first thing but none of the latter due to being phoned up at 2:30 by Rob Newson. He continued to talk to me about Linuxy and BSDy things for 3 hours, by which time it was time for Time Team on the telly and it was getting dark outside.

What I did manage to do was fit the memory I’d got replaced the day before in my games PC. After a few hours trying to sort out why Windows 98SE was having problems I found the answer on the web.. Once the system memory (including any memory on AGP cards) goes above 512MB the calculated size of the system’s disk cache becomes bigger than the main memory, so you get the system crashing out with out of memory errors! The fix is to set a specific size in the system.ini file (after first removing memory so you can actually boot the machine).

Well, the machine is now fully working and runs far more quickly than it did before even though the speed of the porcessor hasn’t changed. This would be partly due tot eh faster memory and partly due to the faster hard disk with an 8MB onboard cache. Windows is really quite disk bound, especially when booting.

Oh, there is one thing.. Windows’ scandisk and defrag can’t handle 80GB hard disks.. they just stop working giving an out of memory error. Strangely, the DOS scandisk doesn’t have this problem. Hmm.

After getting up at 6:30 am (blurgh!) I managed to get to the court on time.

For the morning session I sat in the juror’s waiting area, read my book,
looked at the walls and 3.75 hours later we were told that those of us not
picked for a jury so far could go to lunch and come back at 2pm.

Lunch was spent wandering around Oxford trying to find a cheapish place to
eat. I finally picked Aunty May’s Pasty shop where I had a very disappointing
Pork and Apple pasty which was mostly apple. This made me feel a little queezy
as I was already very tired from getting up so early and being litterally
bored sick.

I then popped over to Starbucks in Cornmarket to get some stimulant before returning to the court.

I then sat, waited and read until 3:05pm when I and 14 other people were
told that we had been picked as floating jurors for a case tomorrow and that
we could go home for the day. The poor people who had been picked almost
at the beginning of the day for a case had to still wait as all the stuff
before their case had overrun and overrun, so I was rather lucky.

Anyway, it seems that tomorrow I start being a juror properly.. that’s assuming
I’m picked for the final jury out of the 15 selected.

On the whole, today’s been a waste of time for all those who were called
for duty as only 12 people actually went into a court room, and they were
continuing a trial from last week!

I can see why the court system is gumming up with cases.