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.