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.