As in a warning about spoilers to be found elsewhere. See last paragraph.

Had today off work, decided that a Monday was the least painful day to try some Christmas shopping, so went up to Oxford/Regent Street. It wasn’t much worse than a normal Saturday (so slightly worse than hell itself then) and I actually had a fair amount of success.

Books in Borders (with £5 off thanks to the voucher in Saturday’s Guardian) for brother and mother. More books in the BBC Shop (always worth a look as they often have recent BBC releases at cut prices and older releases that you can’t find elsewhere anymore) for father and, um, myself.

Then to the Apple Store to buy wife’s present. That place is like some sort of strange cult. They were even running training sessions for iTunes upstairs. iTunes for heaven’s sake, one of the simplest-to-use pieces of software ever written. I wondered whether they could identify me as a Windows using apostate via mystical means? And when I got to the front of the queue I realised that the only PIN I could remember was that of my debit card, so good as I’m not building up a debt but bad as in I can’t play games with the interest free period and keep my savings intact for another month’s worth of interest.

And to make Lettice very happy I bought the Christmas Radio Times. Out came the pink highlighter as soon as I got home. I hope we get some good DVDs for Christmas because other than Doctor Who the telly looks dire this year. And speaking of RT and DW, there’s a ten page feature that spoils the Christmas special in just about every detail. Still, some people will like the pictures of David Tennant in his jim-jams. Oh, and a chance to win one of the actual Daleks from the ‘05 series…

Today a nice BT engineer fixed our line which had been down since Thursday. Whilst it was down PlusNet activated our ADSL. So now we have a nice fat 2Mb broadband connection and a wireless router. I could be posting this sitting on the loo. But I’m not … or am I?

I’m going through some old floppy discs and seeing what’s on them, archiving what’s worth keeping and then binning the discs. (In ten years time I’ll be repeating the process with CD-ROMs.)

Found a lot of naff clip art, a pub quiz I wrote, some pieces of fiction, posters I designed in support of a JCR rent strike, and … a whole bunch of e-mails from 1994-7.

There are e-mails there from some of the brilliant and lovely people who I knew back then but with whom I’ve subsequently lost touch. But when I look at the ones I wrote… oh boy. Did I really write those? What sort of person was I back then? Not so brilliant and lovely it would seem. Do I keep the e-mail as a reminder of what a horribly self centred and angsty student I was? Or do I put that all behind me and forget about it?

[Update] Hmm, I guess that the fact that I wrote the above means that I’m not totally over being self-centred and angsty.

Well, yesterday’s computer turned out to be the wrong computer. I eventually got the right one today (faster processor, four times more RAM, double the size of the hard drive) and spent the afternoon installing all the software again.

The train home was only two carriages.

1. My grandfather’s funeral tomorrow.
2. Too much work.
3. Blog vanished in a sea of PHP error messages for twenty-hours and then came back as suddenly and mysteriously as it had gone.
4. Norton Internet Security going haywire and killing first e-mail and then all Internet connections. I killed it in turn.
5. No pink_weasel.
6. Except on Wednesday when the BT SMS service thingy phoned me about six times with what it claimed was a message from Lettice’s mobile number saying just “please call”. A call to her parents and then a call to her (at Versailles at the time) revealed this to be nothing to do with her.
7. Had to cancel an Idle Speculators meeting on Monday.
8. Recruitment consultants almost fighting over me. Nice if they weren’t such utter muppets concerning, oh just about everything.

Please, can next week be less hassle?

I think something is buggered. I blame Windows. Of course. Two pieces of software are acting oddly. Norton Internet Security tells me something about “Symantic User Session has encountered a problem and needs to close” whilst Pegasus Mail tells me that the connection is being refused by all four of my mail servers. The fact that my firewall and my e-mail bugger up at the same time is very worrying. I suspect that some Windows driver or whatnot (technical term) that those two processes use has been corrupted but who knows?

I see an evening of burning backups and reinstalling stuff. That needs stamina, stamina needs fuel, fuel of the frothy brown liquid variety. Maybe. Grragh.

£400 for a Mac Mini? Hmm….

This is my normal desktop:

This is my desktop after a visit from a weasel:

Sigh

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? (requires Flash, boo).

I’m shopping for a new laptop, but maybe I should be shopping for pizza instead: 14″ PowerPizza

I’m downloading and installing SP2 for Windows XP as I type.

This may be unwise.

…

[Update] Still here.

Whilst adding the original entry I got to wondering what the XP in Windows XP stood for. Then I remembered (oh all right, Google remembered for me) that it stood for eXPerience. Bleargh.