The new laptop I bought this morning – on the grounds that I had a mostly-dead one, and if I prevaricated any more when it came to specifications, operating systems and haggling over every last penny, I'd disappear up my own brown starfish, so I just picked up a "pile it high, sell it cheap" standard Compaq-HP thingy in a supermarket for three-hundred-and-fifty of your Earth pounds – is working well.

So far.

Normally I have a nervous breakdown if forced to shell out more than £16 for anything at all, but I really had to close my eyes and just bend over whilst T***o swiped my debit card down my arse-cheeks. It's been a couple of months since I first expressed my need for new chips, and whilst the minor gripes about my laptop changed into major cardiac arrest and eventual body-bag procession, the minor gripes about my desktop – always having to move things about to squeeze the last megabyte out of them, having to worry about system resources if not actual memory – have started to creep up on me.

I know I really should clean the drive and install Linux from scratch, but I can't be arsed at this juncture. I'm salving my conscience by migrating to OpenOffice, GIMP and taking as much glee as possible at chasing down every last Internet Exploder file and clicking "Delete", as if I were the Yorkshire Ripper and they were errant prostitutes whom God had told me were abominations*.

I could use this space to grouch about minor driver issues, or the fact that Creative has no support whatsoever for my Zen under v***a, or but I'm too busy transferring music files from my old desktop to this new machine [nickname: "Jam Explosion"].

No doubt more issues will arise over the next couple of weeks, but bugger it.

I owe a few of you emails, phone calls, n00dz, that kind of thing. I'll get to them soon. Just let me set up CM01/02 on here and….

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* I would like to apologize for this simile, but it kind of came to mind when I flicked through a show on telly last night about the Alpha Course: twelve agnostics were put through the brainwashing. From the small portion I saw, none of them asked the pertinent questions I would about monotheistic belief. Mr Sutcliffe is a prime example of one of my first objections to such, and nobody has ever given me a rational answer.

Hurrah. Survived another Feb 17th and did not drink¹.

Also, did not mope around listening to early Marillion albums, did not pine for ancient history, did not write any shitty poetry. Win.

Instead: I treated myself to the latest Doro Pesch album -

- which, as is customary for the genre, shouldn't be examined too closely for deep meaning or innovation, but works very nicely on its own level; Herzblut is a particularly cool track, even if it is in German².

Add to that the forthcoming Cruicifed Barbara album and you can see that my head's very much in aging rock chick mode.

My eyes even drifted over an advert in the paper this morning for a forthcoming Bonnie Tyler gig in Ipswich.

Just for a second. Then sense was regained.

…especially when I saw the price….

Anyway, if you've got any recommendations for female metal/rock/fillintheblank, feel free to use the comment box. I know about all the obvious ones, but if there's something obscure you think I may have overlooked…

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An odd thing this morning: for half an hour I couldn't get on this site. Every time I tried, instead of showing a page, it came up with a dialog box: "Firefox has found a stream: x-httpd-php - Open? Save?"

A bit of net digging found that this was a misconfigured server problem, perhaps related to some messing about I did to try to connect this blog to my FaceArse account. I reversed that, and everything worked again.

Has anyone else had this problem, or was it just for a few minutes this morning?

[Yeah, I know, it'd be so much easier to move my blogging back to Xanga, LiveJournal, OKC or somewhere like that. Balls to it. I like being able to muck around under my own bonnet.³]

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 shoenotes:
1 Even years later, although 99.9% of the urge has disappeared, I'll be minding my own business wandering round the supermarket or something, and the corner of my eye will just catch a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and send a message to my brain; "Hey! Wouldn't it be bitchenly amazing to drink me?" No it frogging wouldn't is the instant answer, and I move on; but this is one of the problems of having alcohol as my weakness. I mean, ex-smackheads don't have to pass massive advertising hoardings every day that say "JUNK: IT'S REALLY FANTASTIC, HONEST" in two-foot high letters…
2 My knowledge of which was limited by having a French and German teacher at school who absolutely excelled at ensuring that we had no motivation whatsoever to learn anything. My list of "people I'd like to slap round the face with a two-ton haddock" has very much shrunk over time as I've worked through the frustrations of my early years, but she's still on it.
3 or hood, but that's starting to sound rather euphemistic…

soundtracktotodaysentryisdirtylove

As I write a strong tidal surge has just passed the coast near me, causing only mild flooding to parts of the East Anglian shoreline rather than the deluge that some were fearing.

Apart from a little water over the top at Yarmouth and Felixstowe, and a couple of closed roads, everyone seems to have got off pretty lightly – though other parts of the country are still in danger as the surge spreads out over the North Sea.

[Lowestoft is undamaged. Damn!]

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The past couple of evenings have been spent playing a lovely game of Fun With FTP – Max's blog somehow got broken, and needed rebuilding. Twice [since someone unnamed but whose name begins with F and ends with ish didn't do it properly the first time and forgot to deactivate old plugins].

She's lost her old front page, and has had to go with a completely new template; she's having to spend quite some time tweaking it back to how she wants it again.

So I'd like to emphasize this to all you people out there: Backups. Backups. Backups. That applies to Xangarians etc., as well as people with their own blogs [on Xanga it's under "Archive Files"].

You won't know how useful they are until you actually need them, and you'll curse heaven and earth if you haven't got any.

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Wii Update: B's friend's-brother's-cousin's-llama's-son-in-law-or-something works at a specialist gaming shop somewhere in deepest Essex, and is anticipating a delivery next week; one will be put aside for her for someone with a car [that still hasn't got a malfunction light on ] to come and pick up.

P. had better be bloody greatful.

Although, given the usual manner of kids and Xmas morning, I'm not holding my breath.

Next, we'll turn our attention to the elder P. and her wish to be bestowed with the joys of the digital camera. Oh, how fun this family thing is turning out to be…

[My present? She already found something rather nice in a donation to her shop....]

soundtracktotodaysentryisloveyoutilithurts

My Zen player is full to brim. Who'd've thought 20 gigabytes [although it's actually 19 and a bit, swizz] of hard disk space wouldn't be enough for someone's music?

At the minute putting anything on means either taking something else off – and it can take me hours to decide to dump anything – or compressing other mp3s' bitrate until enough space squeezes in, which can take up to half an hour per album to do.

At nearly two years of age, the Zen has done its job very well; its only battle scars are one small crack on the screen and a tendency to occasionally think you've pressed "play/pause" when you've pressed "next track". But I think it's time to keep an eye on a replacement.

A quick look on Amazon confirms my fears: the age of the high-capacity mp3 player is over, and the age of the high-capacity mp3/video player is here. Which, to someone who wouldn't use it for video content, means that they've just got a good excuse to slap another £100 on the purchase price for a colour widescreen display when, for me, a small mono window does the job perfectly well.

So to upgrade will be upwards from £200 [over US$400], which is a price tag which makes the Scotsman in me jump up and down in a cold sweat and want to hide behind the nearest yak.

That's unlikely to be a price I'll pay right now, unless something happens to my current player.

So either I've got to spend more time squeezing things up, or I've got to get a whole lot more selective about what mp3s I carry around with me. Life without a complete collection of seventies Yes albums? Gee….

soundtracktotodaysentryis15minutesoffame

I upgraded the blog's software to WP2.3 yesterday. This means nothing to those of you who don't have your own WordPress installation, except that it's added tag functionality. [a quick hat tip to this fine post for much good stuff on adding tags to a WP theme]

On the front page, on the sidebar on the right, is now a tag cloud, so you could automatically find all the posts on one particular subject.

For example, if you were Kyu, you'd click on the "puffins" tag, and lo and behold you'd get all the posts pertaining to puffins.

Which now includes this one:

I hope I've got the kind of things that should be tags right, but feel free to shout if you think I've missed something important.

Although it does gall me how "laziness" is now seen to be one of my top tags…

soundtracktotodaysentryisimissyou [possibly my fave video ever]

* The two catchphrases resounding around my head today: "Spider-Pig, Does Whatever A Spider-Pig Does" and "Kneel before Zod!"

no, "kneel before Zod" doesn't have any double entendre connotations.
Minds out of the gutter, people!

* Who wants a mix CD? Say so and I'll mail you the link.

* Football season starts Saturday! Yay! Ipswich start at home to Sheffield Wednesday – unfortunately, I'm already pencilled in to go to Harwich that day.

For those who don't know, that's where most of the ferries from northern Europe come into port. Which reminds me of this important joke:

Linnea from Stockholm goes to see her priest…
"Father, I need some advice."
"What is it, my child?"
"well… My fiance, Ulf, has asked me to take a holiday in England with him."
"And what's wrong with that?"
"ummm… you see, Father, he booked us on the overnight ferry over to England without asking me; and when he showed me the tickets, I saw that he'd booked a double room with only one bed."
"Ah."
"So, Father, can you tell me; is it sinful to have sex before Harwich?"

* My laptop has developed a strange display fault; it seems to think the right-hand edge of the screen is six inches further along than it should be. Which makes what should look something like this…

…become more like this;

It's not a Windows fault – it's like that on all the screens leading up to loading, and whatever resolution I set it to.

But I can't find any way to get into the screen settings – it's nowhere in the BIOS menu, and the only "hotkeys" on my laptop [an Acer Aspire 1350] are for brightness and contrast.

Any ideas, anybody?