Not dead, just resting

There's been a severe lack of writing going on round here recently. No excuses. I've just not been motivated to blog. Which isn't to say that things haven't happened, I just have that Summer Holiday Syndrome whereby lazing takes a high priority.

• I've spent the last ten days with Kevin, which was lovely. However, due to the fact that I'm so used to being around him all the time, I'm already missing him lots even though he just went home this afternoon. Gawd knows how I shall survive until the weekend.

  I drove to Kevin's on the afternoon of bank holiday Friday, which turned out to be a mistake resulting in my sitting on the M25 for a total of ten junctions and three hours (this section of the journey usually takes about 45 minutes). It was then a further hour before I reached my destination.

  Gah. Lots.

• We saw The Terminal on Sunday, which turned out to be quite nice, but disappointingly mediocre. There were some very nice jokes in there, and the opening credits were impressive (if nothing else, worth noting for their subtlety), but it was a little long and a little — well — Spielberg-y. Still worth watching though, overall.

• I'm getting quite used to my new resolution of 1280x1024, and being surprised by how large everything looks at 1024x768 (my hitherto default). It has prompted me to change something on my website (in the classic designer's "change it to make sure it looks good on my computer") — the background graphic wasn't large enough to cover the screen when there were that many more pixels (leaving disturbing white strips at the top and bottom of the viewport). It is now.

• I've got my first Gmail spam, despite only about four people knowing my address. Speaking of Gmail, I don't believe I'll ever get rid of all my Gmail invites. I've given a few away, but Google keep bumping the number back up to six. Bastards.

• I've been having very bizarre dreams lately, the most disturbing of which saw my mother going into business by selling the Mozilla browser to people over the phone. People even more clueless than she (I remember her explaining to someone broadly what a browser is, and why someone might want to buy one).

• More bragging about my luvley new computer I'm afraid — it's the keyboard this time. I have one of the Microsoft multimedia keyboards (the Natural) which has a row of buttons at the top with such functions as play, stop, volume, etc. This evening I was delighted to discover that not only have these buttons been associated with iTunes without me ever telling the keyboard such a thing, but they can be used to control iTunes in the background, without ever having to bring the application to the front.

  This discovery again reminded me of my irritation with the fact that iTunes always remains in the taskbar and you can't just minimise it to the system tray. At least when Winamp did that it showed you what song was currently playing. However, a ten-second Google brought up a little application called PowerMenu, which adds to the taskbar application's context menu the following items: "Always on Top", "Minimize to Tray", "Transparency", and "Priority" (although you can run the program without selected features to reduce clutter). Bliss. Begone, iTunes, and henceforth plague my taskbar no more.

366 days

Yesterday marked Kevin's and my anniversary — it was 366 days (leap year, remember) since he asked me out. We found it quite funny (in a tragic sort of way) that we'd be able to look up the exact time of the event since at least one of us has timestamped IRC logs.

I can honestly say it's been the happiest year I've ever had.

You can't trust 'em

The great upheaval

So I'm moving up to Warwick University on Sunday in preparation for the start of term on Monday (my birthday). This means two things:

1. This year I'll actually be celebrating my birthday on 25th September for a change, so I can do the whole presents/cake/celebration thing with people around whom I've known for more than a few hours.
2. This week has largely consisted of rushing around getting things together for packing.

The above has involved such things as a huge great list sorted into sections (food, personal, kitchenware, etc.), waking up in the middle of the night muttering "Soy sauce. Oh, and plasters", and wrangling with my parents over exactly which frying pans I'm allowed to take, and whether or not I'm likely to need more than two forks/knives/spoons.

In preparation for the non-TV-ness of university life, I've bought a new addition to my computer — a, um, a TV tuner card. Should I hang my head in shame? But it's really cool! Of course, the irony's going to be that, having got all this snazzy equipment, I'll get a really bad reception once there. Oh well. I tried.

I bought a Student Cookbook today, just for simple recipes since I've never really cooked much. Looking inside, I was quite reassured that I'd be able to cope with the complexity — there were a number of recipes for baked beans on toast. Simple living...

Gmail-o-matic

As everyone must do by now, surely, I have a Gmail account. And since everyone else (everyone else who wants one, I should point out) already has one, I've only managed to get rid of a couple of my invites in the traditional invite-only-people-who-you-know-and-trust manner.

And they've been piling up. And they keep being topped up. And they were getting on my nerves until last week, when I discovered the isnoop.net gmail invite spooler where you email them with your Gmail invites. People who want one enter their email address, and receive one as soon as is possible.

It's wonderful — I've been giving out six invites a day, revelling in the moment when I reach a total of zero but still confident of the fact that there'll be another six when I look tomorrow. Of course, the problem with getting rid of them this way is that, when filling out a Gmail invite form, you must enter a first name and a last name. No getting round that, you have to enter something at least. Which has led to the current state of my inbox (click to enlarge):

Of course, my only problem now is that I have to think up six new names each day. There's always something, isn't there?

N.B. Suggestions gratefully accepted.