Hair today

Today I did what I traditionally do almost every year, and got a haircut. Having moved to the northern wilderness of Coventry and not knowing any local recommended hairdressers, I plumped for Toni & Guy, who I hear — as much as I know about such things — have a fairly good reputation (as reflected in their prices).

I've been growing my hair out for years now — I used to think it wouldn't grow below armpit level until I realised that it just grows slower at that length, and all you need to do to let it grow even longer is to, well, not cut it. Seems rather obvious, but for years I've been told by hairdressers and parents that "it'll grow faster if you keep it trimmed properly". Here's a fact for the hard-of-thinking (and of course I include myself in that group): hair grows from the root, not from the ends.

Today however I went from an all-round even long length to a long length with some short bits around the face, including a fringe-type bit that seems to enjoy hanging over my eyes. I'm not used to short bits, so as I was walking around town with my shiny new haircut I realised I would need some kind of hair clips to keep them out of my face. Unfortunately I skipped over the whole buying-mounds-of-hair-accessories when I was younger, and so I don't possess any (and if I did, I wouldn't have brought them up to Coventry when moving!)

So I stopped off in a shop normally frequented by 10-12 year old girls, and am now the proud owner of a whole bunch of clips, hair slides and hair bands.

I feel like such a girl :-)

Happenings

In the weeks since my last post, I have...

• Been to the Lake District for a week with my parents and managed to take almost 900 photos. Only 100 or so made it onto Flickr, but I was still rather pleased with them on the whole.

• Upgraded Thunderbird to 1.5.0.7, had it lose all my emails since July 2005, decided enough was enough, and ditched it. (I've been automatically forwarding all email to Gmail forever as a backup, so it didn't hurt me too much.) I think July 2005 may have been when version 1.5 came out, but Mozilla make it so damned difficult to find any information on release dates on the Thunderbird site that I'm just guessing.

  Update: I finally thought to check on Wikipedia. (Why does Wikipedia have so much better information on this than Mozilla?) It may have been when I upgraded to 1.1. Who knows what enigma lies in the heart of Thunderbird?

  I am now with Eudora for email, which I used until switching to Thunderbird 3-4 years ago, and with Gravity for newsgroups. Gravity is bliss. I am annoyed with myself for not having tried it sooner.

• Got comment spammed to death after upgrading to Movable Type 3.3 (from 2.6.6.1), and whilst at the Lake District. When I say "to death", I mean to the death of the server, which fell over a number of times, under a load more than 1000 times that which is typical, before Kevin found the cause of the problem. My comment and trackback scripts were summarily 403'd, and left that way for a couple of weeks before I bothered to get around to renaming my comment script from the default MT filename in order to thwart the evil spammers who would be searching for this default filename. Ha!

  This tactic managed to slip under the radar and successfully resist attacks until about 5-10 minutes after the scripts came back online again. I am currently looking into other options.

• Chosen my third year modules in preparation for going back to uni on Monday. (Gaah.) Accidentally chose 171 CATs' worth (like credits) instead of the usual 120 since I forgot to include the two core modules when doing my arithmetic. I thought that was rather a large load...

• Turned 21! The traditional present in our family at this age ("traditional" in this case meaning "it happened with my brother") is the family's second-hand car to pass off as our own. However, I decided earlier this year that I live close enough to uni to continue taking the bus, and can also borrow Kevin's car should I need to, and so didn't need a car. The good news is that I got a laptop instead :-) Specifically, an HP TC4400 tablet PC with a 2GHz Intel Core Duo processor, which is super-cool. The handwriting recognition is amazingly good, even with my scrawly mess.