Yes. This.
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All these things that I have done
Oh joy! Have just discovered gMail supports IMAP. No longer will I have to look at the horrible interface, I can just use Thunderbird without having to give up having all my mail labeled and organised the same on all my computers. I know, it shouldn't make me that happy, but there you are, I'm an odd person.
Having now spent a little time playing Rock Band, I can safely say that it is just as much fun as I thought it would be. I need to get more into practice on the guitar again though - I'm getting rusty. If you could play it with the guitars I've got, I would get the PS2 version just so that I could play some of the tracks on guitar - there's some really good fun stuff on there.
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In case any of my flisters are keeping anything interesting on .Mac, you might want to be aware that Apples password security is not all that you might want.
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When I get into work, I click the button to start Outlook and then the one to start IE. It always amuses me that by the time Outlook has got itself started up and is ready to check my overnight mail, let alone sort it into folders, IE is up and running and I've already loaded gMail to check my personal mail :)
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So, an update. It's been a while since I did a proper one of those. Not sure why - have been rather quiet/shy online lately for no particularly good reason.
Had a meeting with the architect this lunchtime to check some stuff about the boiler, which will have to be moved as part of the building work, annoyingly. Aparently, we can have it downstairs even if the bathroom is upstairs which sounds weird to me, but far be it from me to contradict the architect (actually, even if this turns out to be untrue, there is somewhere sensible we can put it so I'm not worried). We have now sent off our paperwork for buildings regs and I have to start asking around for quotes from builders. This is rather scary as then the cost of the project will actually start to become real. Yikes!
Ended up having a very quiet weekend as ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
white_hart and topicaltim were in no state to come over for Sunday lunch. It was quite nice, actually, though. Alex and I played a co-op career in GHIII, me on medium rhythm (relaxing :)) and him on easy bass (first time) so that when Rock Band comes out we'll be in practice. Actually, I wonder if I could pick up a copy while I'm in the states - will it work on a UK PS2 if I do that? Mind you, strikes me as something that it would be tricky to get onto the flight home :)
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accomplished]Start as you mean to go on
Well, so far, 2008 is alright with me. Saw it in over at coalescent and bibliolicious' flat, already fully unpacked and looking great. Didn't actually stay up much past midnight - we started moving around 12:20 and finally managed to get out of the door by 12:50 :)
New Years Day was lunch with white_hart, topicaltim and lslaw, which is becoming a New Year tradition. Managed to downgrade topicaltims computer without anything horrible happening (bar one problem with the sound that they didn't discover until yesterday but has since been resolved by Google) which was a relief. Lunch was delish as always and it was followed by the also now traditional showing of films that I haven't seen but really should, in this case It's a Wonderful Life (liked it) and Monty Python And The Holy Grail (v funny indeed).
Just to round it off, Alex and I had a nice walk back from the centre of town to home instead of catching the bus and then I played Guitar Hero III for a bit, scoring my first perfect - 100% of My Name Is Jonas on medium.
Not a bad start to the year, all told.
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So, I turned off my phone last thing on Friday to switch the batteries (I keep a spare and switch between them so that I don't have to leave my phone plugged in to charge) and when I put the other battery back in it wouldn't switch on. Tried both batteries, tried plugging it in, all no dice - dead phone.
I absolutely have to have a phone this week for Brownies if nothing else (we're going out to the theatre) so I decided I was going to have to brave the horrible weather and go into town to see the Vodafone man. They too had a go but had no luck getting the thing to switch on. They offered to send it off for repairs but as I had been considering a new phone anyway when my contract ran out next month I decided to pick one up now for the hell of it (I can tell you're surprised :)).
I had been considering the Samsung G600 with the 5 megapixel camera but when I sat down with the chap downstairs and he asked me what I was looking for I gave him the details (internet, camera, not too bothered about music) and he suggested the F700 instead and got me one out to play with. Well, we all know that's the best way to sell me a gadget :) I was hooked really quickly and decided to go for it within about a minute of having it in my hand.
The amazing thing was that when we looked at my last couple of bills, I run out my minutes way too often (which I had realised and was planning to change when contract expired) so I have ended up on a new plan with many more free minutes, fixed price internet up to a reasonable limit (described as unlimited in the ads, but there you go) for about half what my bill has been for the last couple of months and a beautiful phone thrown in for free!
So far I like it a lot - the keyboard is great for messaging (although slightly awkward if you've also got the power plugged in), the touchscreen is nice, web browsing is fast and the whole experience is very pretty. Unfortunately, what it doesn't have that my old phone did is syncML built in. It hadn't occurred to me to ask about this as I kind of assumed it would be pretty standard but apparently not. I had been using it on the old phone to keep a backup of contacts and calendar to the interwebs via ScheduleWorld after my contacts got too big for my sim (and boy am I glad I did!) but unfortunately, I couldn't then just point my new phone at SW and be off again. It took me some considerable time to get a contacts backup in vCard format (SWs fault) which I could sync with my phone and I still haven't managed to get my Google calendar into vCal format so that I can transfer it over.
Long term, I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it though. I really like having my google calendar available to me on my work desktop but do I really need it there if I've got it on my phone? I've spent a bit of time trying to get gCalSync to work but no dice there as it just keeps giving me certificate errors so it looks like I have to choose and we all know there's only one way of making a choice on LiveJournal...
Poll #1103667
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16
What shall I do about my phone vs web calendars?
View Answers
Ignore the phone calendar. Get Google to send reminders by text and add new appts via the web browser on your phone if you can't wait
8 (50.0%)
Ignore Google calendar. Just get all your data copied over and use your phone - it's not like you need to share the data or go out without your phone 3 (18.8%)
Do an awkward manual sync - install Outlook on your PC, sync that with Google and your phone with that 2 (12.5%)
Keep them both up to date manually (if you pick this I will assume you hate me) 1 (6.2%)
OWIWEIC 2 (12.5%)
I would be inclining more towards option 1 except that I really like the way the calendar app on the phone works so I am currently more or less agnostic. Break the deadlock in my brain!
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I see that the new .asia domain opens up today - so I was wondering, ala del.icio.us, what exciting new domain names it opens up for us? So far, I've come up with
cauc.asia
eur.asia - both possibilities for white supremacists
euth.an.asia - ummm. Campaigning site, maybe?
gymn.asia - More possiblities, here I think :)
What do you think - could get my new web 2.0 start up off to a flying start? What other words end in asia (apart from lots of diseases)?
Edit How about never.starta.landwar.in.asia?
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Yay! Finally got my last essay back from my history course (although not through the eTMA system for some bizarre reason - don't know what was going on there) and I got a 94! First essay I've got a first on, so I'm feeling rather chuffed about that. Of course now I have another one to write but at least that puts me into it feeling in a good mood.
I'm currently trying to reset my old Q1 to factory settings and it's not very keen. It seems to have stalled while trying to install the .NET framework 1.1 and won't go any further but I refuse to be deterred. I'm still loving the new one very much indeed, even in all it's vista-ness. I think I'll stick with Vista for the time being for the lovely handwriting recognition. Plus I can use it to test things for LJ support :)
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Well even Yahoo mail turned out to have problems fetching my email from other accounts (partly the fault of said account, but gMail works around it) so it looks like I'll have to stick with gMail a while longer. I have to admit that part of what worries me about gMail is their ubiquity and the idea they seem to have that they should have the right to index everything somehow - they do come across as quite creepy to me these days.
Anyway. One of my other beefs with it was that I do find it quite ugly and as someone who primarily uses IE7, I couldn't use GreaseMonkey to prettify it up for myself. So I did some hunting and came across IE7Pro, an add-on for explorer and boy is it impressive. It contains user scripts, a facility similar to GreaseMonkey (unfortunately I don't think you can use GM scripts out of the box but there's minimal modification required, I think), spell checking (which should take some of the pain out of reading my posts for my Mum!), extra tab features, ad blocking, flash blocking and probably more that I haven't noticed. It's fantastic.
Predictably, I didn't fancy any of the skins I found - most of them didn't work quite right anyway because they were using mozilla specific CSS so I ended up spending a bit of time at the end of the day yesterday designing my own. I'm still not completely happy with it, but it's not bad for the moment.
( my new look gmail )
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What webmail service do you use? Would you recommend it? I've tried Gmail (not a huge fan) and I'm trying Yahoo beta at the moment and really liking it but I'm not really sure what else is out there...
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happy]Its so nice to have Alex home again! We had a really nice relaxing day yesterday - I got some gardening and tidying done while he was at Oxfam and then we had curry and kicked back and listened to music on the TV while messing around with our new purchases. We quite often do a thing where we take turns to pick a track like a DJ battle and this time I actually remembered to save the playlist at the end too.
Harry bought this party because of the mini keyboard, actually the handwriting software is miles better too. It allows you to correct as you go much more easily, which surprisingly makes all the difference for usability. I think it's actually better at the recognition part too, which is good because my handwriting is not getting any better! Apparently, it also learns your writing, although I think I'm pretty inconstant so we'll see how it goes with that. Still, I have managed to handwrite this whole post without too much trouble. Not bad at all.
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Alex introduced me to the blue eyes puzzle - The Hardest Logic Puzzle in the World, according to xkcd. At 11pm after we'd just finished the Prestige (we showed my parents - they agreed it was great!). Cue 30-40 minutes or so of intense thinking and talking it over but we figured it out. Then we went to bed and I ended up turning it over and over in my head - the solution is really hard to get your head around. It was way worse than caffine for getting my head all fizzing but it was good to know I still have my chops as a logician :) (solution here if you want)
The rest of the weekend was much more relaxing - visit from my folks, which is always good, and the tennis at Queens. I suddenly realised that actually Wimbledon doesn't clash with Glastonbury at all this year because it's not for another week and was far too pleased with this realisation - 2 weeks of tennis to come! That should help me recover from the mud I fear we are doomed to :)
I've got the Brownies stuff all sorted out, I think but I'm way behind with my history study for this unit :( I really need to get my butt in gear as I have an essay due a week after I get back and no clue what to write for it so far. I'll have to try to get some of that done tonight - I don't think that a muddy field is the best place for my course books!
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busy]This week really hasn't worked out at all like I expected. I mean, it's been good and all, but now I really have to fit a lot into next week!
Specifically I have to fit in writing my essay for history and visiting the family planning clinic before I head out to the states next week. I also need to finalise the booking for the big party of doom (watch this space for forthcoming date announcements) and reply to a couple of rather urgent emails.
On the other hand, I did make it to Your Song (fave set the Evenings and friends - Thriller! The Locomotion!) where I literally shouted myself hoarse. I also made it to the district meeting which I nearly forgot about (which ran very long indeed!) and finished Season 2 of the West Wing last night, after getting in late from work and waiting ages for pizza.
I also ordered myself the most adorable mp3 player last night. I wanted a new USB flash drive as my current one is not big enough and is starting to look a little loose in the casing and then my mania for convergence devices kicked in and I thought "Wouldn't it be awesome if it was also an MP3 player?! I could stick playlists on it and when I'm at work it could be attached to my computer, charging and playing through there." A bit of hunting around on Amazon turned up this Samsung item which not only does that but is an FM radio too - nifty, eh? It's coming from a market place seller so they're not dispatching it until Monday according to Amazon (although I'm hopeful thats just worse case arse covering and it might turn up earlier - that's certainly been the case with other Marketplace things I've bought) so fingers crossed it'll be here before I head off for my flight on Friday week (squee!). Which reminds me that I also need to find out what you can take on planes these days.
I've also set myself up for a busy weekend and, come to that, a busy week next week, but I'm feeling gregarious lately so I might as well take advantage of it while I can, right? I just have to try and avoid having to take my essay with me to work on while I'm on holiday :)
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