Taken last weekend from near Holyhead, looking out over the Irish Sea. Sometimes you forget that there’s actually quite a lot of good things about home.

Oh, and Danny Beusch is coming to steal your ovaries. That is all.

OK, so I admit it: the training session earlier wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be. Perhaps I need to be more open-minded about my work and not make negative comments about hoops I haven’t even jumped through yet, especially considering my boss’s boss reads my blog 🙂

The new job’s coming together slowly, anyway. I need to talk to more people if I’m ever going to get it straight in my head what we need to do and how we can do it, but I think I’ve made a good start today. Tomorrow’s likely to be written off due to all our furniture being removed in preparation for the new stuff to come in on Thursday, but hopefully I can get back down to it towards the end of the week (scarily not far away already, having taken Monday off!).

Tonight I’ve been trying to relax a bit in the hope of making this nasty bug that’s making my glands swell up go away, before it develops into a full-blown cold or flu. I really can’t get ill at the moment!

I went down to Tescos in Warwick to get a few things I needed and ended up spending £50 on stuff I mostly needed. Probably. But I didn’t have to rush, they had all the things I wanted to buy in stock, I didn’t have to deal with stressed commuters, parents or children on their way home (it was about 8pm by the time I made it down there) and I didn’t have to struggle home with all the shopping, feeling like my hands/arms/shoulders were about to fall off. With all the stress taken away, it’s the kind of domesticity that can be quite calming. I could do without the f**king cold weather though, or the reverse parallel parks I keep having to do on our road. But it’s fine.

So for dinner I had fajitas (which my housemate found fascinating) and cheese bread, all freshly bought from the most evil capitalist money-grabbing firm in this nation’s history. But I’ve had a calm, relaxing evening, so it’s all good. I even watched Big Brother, which looks certain to get even more boring now that John’s been voted out.

And now I’ve cleaned up and dossed around for a bit, it’s time to go to bed. Domesticity may be calming and conducive to getting rid of illnesses, but it’s really boring!

As of this morning Planet Afterlife has yet another new location, and one that should be available while my PC is turned off :-). And a few minor display bugs aside, I’ve discovered the page appears to work fine in IE, which is always a bonus.

On a related note, I got my first Firefox-targetted popup window this morning. Scarily realistic too, it almost had me clicking on it for a second. It’s scary how quickly you get complacent about Internet security when the software you use on a day-to-day basis shields you from the majority of Internet nastiness.

I also extended my domain name registration for wabson.org and wabson.me.uk, which expire today. Perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea to ignore the reminder emails that Easily kept sending me… Anyway if wabson.org breaks for a few hours over the next 24 hours then you’ll know why. Or perhaps you won’t if you can’t read this. Never mind.

More blogging later hopefully, after I’ve finished my three hour training session this afternoon on our new call logging software. Eugh.

Well, kind of anyway. I’ve got a new version working on my computer, but have yet to manage to get it working on a proper server anywhere. So you can access it here as long as my computer is turned on, which let’s face it is most of the time when I’m not asleep.

There’s a much-improved look-and-feel to the web pages, so it should be slightly more visually-stimulating too 🙂

Any comments in the box, please! I’m off to Wales now.

We decided they were fairly average in the end. It was definitely a refreshing experience to see Charlie doing the fairly rocky stuff they covered in the set, but it really didn’t blow me away by any stretch.

It was cool having Charlie from Busted on stage in the Marketplace on the day the band split (rumour had it that a load of twelve year olds were banging on the windows of Battered at one point, convinced that he was entirely to blame for the band’s sad demise), and it was the randomness of this that made the experience generally bearable, in the face of me not drinking and there being far too many stupid c**nts there.

Apparently you weren’t allowed to take cameras into the place, and the security people were confiscating them off people as they went in. But they didn’t confiscate mine 🙂

So the rumours were true. If it wasn’t for the substantial (and growing) overdraft I have at the moment, I’d be tempted to buy something from the new range. Something. Anything. It’s all damned nice!

My new phone is also very pretty, however. It’s a shiny new Nokia 6320, only two days old and weighing in at a mere 97g (apparently). It cost me less (at least up-front) than Apple’s pretty things, so it’s all good. And most importantly, it comes with 400 free minutes a month for calling people with, in line with my big plan for keeping in touch with people more.

Unfortunately (for reasons I’ll explain shortly) the phone also comes with a new number. And while otherwise doing quite well in my plan so far IMHO, I still haven’t managed to text everyone in my phonebook to tell them this. I’m not even sure I will. It just seems like such a contrived thing to do and besides, I’m keeping the old pay as you go SIM card to use occasionally for texts. But I probably should all the same, shouldn’t I?

What I’ll say for now is that if you take my old number, type it into a calculator, add 236450906 and stick the leading zero back on to the result then you get the new one. Sound simple?

Anyway, all of my proper friends should be avid readers of this blog, so now you should all have it 🙂

According to a number of news sites today, Apple have filed a lawsuit against the author of Think Secret, alleging that the article published last week (in which the author claimed that Apple are about to announce a new sub-£500 screen-less Mac) contains trade secrets.

The fact that Apple have turned to the courts once again to further their aims isn’t much of a surprise given some of their recent conduct. Neither is The Register’s condemnation of the move particularly surprising, accusing Apple of being anti-free speech amongst other things. What is interesting, however, is that the legal action would appear to validate what was originally speculation, at least in the eyes of the media.

Ignoring all the politics, a sub-$500 peice of Apple kit sounds like a cool idea. I really hope they do this.

I’ve got to stop writing such melodramatic blog entries. That aside, the thoughts are appreciated 🙂

The photo’s taken near Lligwy beach, not far from where we used to live before my mum moved over to Rhosybol a couple of years ago. I took it yesterday on the walk I went on along the cliffs. Sometimes you have to go away from a place for a bit to really appreciate it.

OK, so a lot of people have had one hell of a worse Christmas than me, but still…

The last week or so has been pretty draining for me and that, combined with lack of broadband access has meant I haven’t been particularly active in the blogging world of late.

My mum was admitted into hospital on Christmas morning, having suffered a stroke. It’s by no means as bad as it could be, but she’s still in hospital at the moment and is likely to be for a few more weeks. We’re hopeful that she’ll be well enough to come home after that, but there’s not much any of us can really do except wait to see how much of a recovery she’s able to make.

I’ve been visiting her every day, and I’ve stayed up here over New Year so I can keep on doing that. It’s left me with little or no plans for tonight, but I’m sure I can cope with one New Year without attending any mediocre house parties or being dragged round a bunch of overly-expensive pubs.

I’m missing quite a few people, but hopefully I can do something about that next week. My current plan is to drive down to Leam on Monday for work the next day and then come back up here at the weekend to see how things are going. I feel like a bit of a c**t for buggering of halfway across the country in three days’ time, but talking to Mary last night helped convince myself that I am doing the right thing.

This will probably be the last entry I make before I get back to Civilisation. It’s just one that I wanted to make in the meantime.

Listening to: Q Radio, via Freeview
Eating: Easter eggs
Grateful to: The handful of people who’ve helped me through the last week. You know who you are.

Matt: I respect you a lot for writing this.

I should have some kind of phone contract sorted out within the next week or so, once I’ve got past the Orange vs. 3 dilemma. Perhaps then, I can start keeping in touch with people a bit better myself.