Monthly Archives: December 2004

Another Year

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That’s another year nearly over. One in which I’ve had some major changes in my life. One which seemed to have flown by in ret­ro­spect (don’t they all?).
Next year will be another year of changes, with any luck the big changes will be the ones anti­cip­ated and planned for, like Jamie going to high school.
Of course, if everything that happened was expec­ted and planned-for, life would be ter­ribly bor­ing. I just wouldn’t want to repeat some of the things that have happened this year.
I’m hop­ing to be a little more vis­ible on line next year. I’m hop­ing to be much more organ­ized and achieve some per­sonal goals. I’m hop­ing that David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done will help. I must lose the weight I’ve gained since stop­ping cyc­ling. I really want to swim more and get bet­ter at it. I want to do some­thing more act­ive with music. I don’t know what yet, but I have recently missed being a (very small) part of the music industry. There are a mil­lion soft­ware things I want to do! There are skills I want to gain, and exper­i­ences I want to… exper­i­ence!
I don’t really expect to achieve a tenth of what I would like, but next year I am determ­ined to do some of them.

This And That

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It’s been a while…

I see that Amazon UK have star­ted their DVD Rental scheme (like Net­flix et al) [Link in top left corner of the page]. I also received an offer from WH Smith with a sim­ilar scheme. The WHSmith’s offer seems a little bet­ter if you watch a lot of movies. £13.99 per month for unlim­ited quant­ity, three at a time. Whereas Amazon’s offer is £9.99 per month but a max­imum of 6 per month, three at a time. Other deals are Amazon £7.99 per month, four per month, two at a time, and WHS­mith £9.99 unlim­ited, one at a time. Both offer free post­age both ways; WHS­mith says first class both ways, Amazon doesn’t spe­cify. For my view­ing pattterns, neither of them rep­res­ent good value! I seem to watch less than one movie a month. But then if I has some­thing as con­veni­ent as this, I would prob­ably watch more. I’m sure Jan and Jamie would.

I’m pleased to report that Kitten’s Spam­in­ator is hand­ling about 90% of my com­ment spam (up to 300 a day). A rename of wp-comment-post.php has elim­in­ated a couple of brain dead script kid­dies. WordPress’ own spam block­ing com­ment mod­er­a­tion cur­rently catches 99% of the rest, but I have to manu­ally mod­er­ate those. I just need to elim­in­ate the rest of those. I’ll invest­ig­ate some more of the WordPress Plu­gins to stop the spammers.

I’m this close to imple­ment­ing David Allen’s Get­ting Things Done. I’m thor­oughly con­vinced, I just need to get over the hump of that ini­tial pro­cess. Actu­ally I have star­ted and man­aged to throw away two bin bags full of old paper­work and magazines.

Gmail con­tin­ues to impress me. I use it every­day and it is cur­rently my main email sys­tem. Though now that Thun­der­bird has reached 1.0, I’ve installed that and I’m test­ing it too. I need to be care­ful though: I have (almost) all my email either redir­ec­ted or copied to my Gmail account. But I can still pickup up some of it via POP3 with Thun­der­bird. I don’t think I want to then have Thun­der­bird also retrieve some of the same mail from Gmail via POP3 (now that is sup­por­ted). I guess I really want an IMAP inter­face to GMail (I think it will come even­tu­ally) with Thun­der­bird as another way to access that and act­ing as a local backup by mak­ing an off­line copy.