Another week at work gone by, and another weekend passed too. Today my productivity has extended to reading another few chapters of The Order of the Phoenix, discovering the best indie radio station ever (apart from possibly XFM), and dragging myself for another run down towards Warwick and back (which I’m hoping made up for all of the calories consumed in Carly’s lovely Sunday dinner). All in all, aot bad a bad set of acheivements for a Sunday, I think.

Back from another trip down to London, this time to celebrate Mr Govan‘s Birthday with some lovely Tapas at a nice restaurant in Soho, and of course a few drinks.

It was a good weekend, I think I needed to get away from this place for a bit. Even the train journey back was alright, and only took two hours – pretty good in the aftermath of the horrible accident near Reading yesterday evening (which we’d passed through an hour or so before it happened).

Right now I’m sat at my computer listening to Jamie Cullum and Saint Etienne from my favorite songs playlist that Rhythmbox has automatically compiled for me. It even lowered the rating of Barbie Girl (no idea how that one got in there…) when I skipped that straight away, causing it to quite rightly drop off the list. I think an early night might be beckoning.

I keep hearing that song everywhere I go. The original is far better.

Today I passed my driving test, finally! Woot! I got four minor faults but that’s no big deal. I intend to celebrate by drinking, socialising and setting off explosives. I love Bonfire Night :-).

As has already been documented elsewhere, the unthinkable happened last night and the U.S. has Bush and his cronies in charge for another four long years. I’m still as speechless as I was this morning at work when I checked BBC News for the first time and this evening when I turned on the TV to hear Kerry’s conecession speech.

I had lunch with a couple of guys from work, as well as an American and a Spaniad who were visiting from the company supplying our wireless management software. None of us could really believe that it was happening. As inevitable as it was under the circumstances, it was still a shock, and I doubt the full impact of what’s happened will be clear for a long time yet.

It feels like a jail sentence, which has just been bestowed upon the world, and it’s so difficult to see past the enormity what has happened and imagine what effect this will have. Let’s just hope the Democrats can do a bit better next time, if there’s anything left of America for them to play for in four years’ time.

Today I’ve deleted literally hundreds of spam comments from the blogs hosted on wabson.org, mine included. They should mostly be gone now.

I’ve also taken a few steps to stop the spam coming back, most notably installing the MT-Blacklist plugin into Movable Type.

MT-Blacklist is currently turned on, and will reject any comments that contain certain phrases, which should result in most spam being rejected. This shouldn’t cause any problems for legitimate comments, but please let me know if it does. For anyone who cares, the blacklist of phrases is available here in text format.

I’d meant to do this a while ago when I first posted about this, but didn’t get round to doing anything about it in the end. Now I have done and I really hope this will solve the problem.

Here’s an interesting one for any iPod owners out there, about how Apple have re-engineered iTunes to break a piece of third party software called iPod Download, that apparently made it easier to copy music off your iPod.

I don’t know a lot about iTunes and how it works with iPods (iPod support for Linux is just non-existant, so I can’t see buying one myself), but moves like this have to either be motivated by Apple’s desire to not share their ‘toys’ with other software developers, or the music industry’s desire to limit what you can do with music that you’ve legitimately bought.

Either way, it’s bad news for anyone who doesn’t want to be restricted with what they do with their music.

Not having done it for a while, and in need of something to do online to waste some time before Top B (maybe), I took a look on the Wayback Machine to remind me what wabson.org used to look like.

I remembered a few things. Firstly, I used to have new photos come up automatically at the top of my blog. I got rid of this last year to give more priority to the blog entries themselves, and I lost the photos completely off the front page when I moved over to MT a few months back. I need to put this back and stop this blog looking like a generic MT blog.

Secondly, I realised how much content I’d managed to lose when I moved over to MT. All of the old blog entries and all of the photos from the old system aren’t on the new blog at all, and I really need to get it all back up there. I’m FTP’ing all the old photos onto my computer from the old server at the moment, which is at least a start.

Now I’m going to go to Top B, and think about how I’m going to make all this work. There’s no rush, after all 🙂

Myself, Dave, Giles and Martin went to Oxygen tonight and ended up entering their Gay Pub Quiz, which we won! So we, as the members of team “Warwick Shame” are now the proud owners of a magnum of Heineken each. Not quite as exciting as a Scissor Sisters concert, I grant you, but it was a nice way to end the weekend all the same 🙂

How all we need to do is find some straight people to give the Heineken to… :-p

I’ve said this before, but I like wandering around cities on my own. You tend to notice a lot more about the places, like how people in Birmingham have no concept of keeping to the right on escalators (quite annoying when you’re trying to get somewhere!).

So I managed to take the shoes I bought last weekend back to Selfridges, after the sole started to come away from the bottom of the shoe after only two days of me wearing them. They gave me a brand new pair, so now they’re officially Nice People™ again 🙂

The train fare there and back cost me £2.70, and it the whole day wouldn’t have cost me any more than that, had I not been tempted by things in some of the other shops in that evil capitalist Bullring thingamy. I should go to Brum more, especially now I live within walking distance of a train station. As long as I don’t want to walk up any escalators, it’ll be fine 🙂

So last night myself and Milly slept in their living room, myself on the sofa and her in the armchair. I was awoken at 7am when the kids’ TV programmes came on (the TV had been left on in the corner of the room) and decided that it would be a good idea to go home.

I’ve decided there are two types of multiple occupancy houses or flats. Firstly there’s the kind of ‘cool’ places where everyone knows each other, trusts each other and generally get on. It’s the kind of place I’ve been lucky to live in for the previous two years, and it’s the kind of place where you can fall asleep on the sofa all night and it’s fine because it feels like a safe environment.

Secondly there’s the kind of house where you don’t have all these criteria, and that’s more like the kind of place I’m living in now. It’s comforting that I know people who live in places that fit into the former category, who don’t mind me passing out in their living rooms :-).