Another weekend up in Wales, another three-and-a-half hour drive back down to Leam again for work tomorrow. Things still seem to be improving with my mum, though it’s all slow progress, still.

They did some more tests today while I was visiting. It seems her short-term memory still isn’t what it could be, but now they’ve established this they can start doing some activities that should stimulate that area of the brain. The consultant wants her to to do more physiotherapy on a daily basis as well, but as there’s only one physiotherapist based at the hospital, that might prove difficult apparently. I guess all I can do is see how things progress this week, so not much change there 🙂

Other than my frequent visits to the hospital, I’ve done very little over the weekend, although this morning I did manage to clean all the mud off the car that (a) flew onto it off a tractor, and (b) got spattered over the side of it when I had to veer out of the way of oncoming traffic that was going too fast on some stupidly narrow country lanes. Don’tcha just love the countryside? And sentences that go on for almost an entire paragraph? And sentences that start with the word ‘and’? OK, I’ll stop now.

So last night we discovered that Birmingham (Nightingales specifically) apparently isn’t the place to go on a Friday night. You’d have thought I might have noticed this last year, when I was going over there a lot more for various reasons, but apparently not.

We’d almost gone to London, but had abandoned that idea when it became clear that nothing seemed to be going on there, at least among the two people we managed to get hold of. Birmingham was choice number two, having ruled out everywhere else in the West Midlands.

We got there quite late. Bar-that-I-can’t-remember-the-name-of at the top of Hurst Street was a bit quiet, but nice. Gales was also pretty quiet and had some *very* random people in there (including a short, fat black man dressed up as Beyonce, who was giving out glowsticks to anyone that wanted one). But nonetheless, it was good to do something different.

I guess the moral is that random nights out, planned on the spur of the moment, are good. In fact that’s one thing I really miss about living in London. There’s much less scope here for randomness, but perhaps that makes it better when it does happen. Even if we did go on the wrong night 🙂

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.