And so I Just booted into XP for the first time in about 2 months in order to take a better look at Office 2007. As soon as I've logged in, the Sun Java updater alerts me that a new version of Java is available and asks me whether I'd like to claim my free copy of Open Office.

I wandered into a lecture theatre yesterday, fresh from a pair of healthy and confidence boosting pints of Bishops Finger. Not randomly, myself and a number of colleagues, who I have finally realised are human too, were about to give a short presentation with the aim of hawking a fictional idea for fictional cash from big blue.

Are they contagious?

I just created a nice long post about my experiences with the Ballmer Peak, exciting new people and burning ∏, but somehow I broke something and the post went missing. The world hates me and LJ is driving me to suicide and all that.

In the US of A, they watch the cars go round in circles. There are enough roundabouts it Milton Keynes to remind us that it's not much fun.

And of course they have the blondes on the grid. And Martin Brundle is British enough to have to resort to interviewing them to determine their function. Below is a translation from their natural languages into English. (I hope I don't need to point out that both BBC English* and US English are both foreign languages to me.)

So what are you doing here on the grid?

It's not been my week. The old Compaq Proliant 1600 (Dual PII-400 and a 5x9.1GB SCSI raid array) came back for fixing. Having found a replacement for the dud disk and re-built the array, one of the processor slots decides to give up the ghost and the power switch decides not to.

It's amazing the complexity and tearing-out-of-hair involved in taking over a phpBB forum and migrating it to Drupal. Not only is there the braindeadness of phpBB to deal with, but a wealth of interesting libel, and the most wonderful of user protests. Aside from the previous administrator's efforts to cover up his own inaction, and a 'healthy userbase' of spammers, the issue with user education has been most enlightening.

I'm using IE 6 right now. I don't particularly like it, however it does work with Xinha http://xinha.python-hosting.com/. Firefox works with Xinha. Konqueror doesn't. No bloody javascript editor works nicely with Konqueror, and I happen to like Konqueror. It's a bit fast.

And then there's Opera. One day a site will look right in Opera.  ....yeah right. Like that's going to happen.