Arg!!! Mayhem today as there was 1 final induction to do, but the person assigned to it is away ill. We only discovered that at the last minute and I was drafted. There were no letters to hand out with username son, and all the temporary usernames had expired.. finally it all was sorted, but not before a few moments of chaos.

Course bookings start today, that is bookings for the courses I will run this term. It's supposed to be hectic with people wanting places.. but so far all is calm.

Just got an e-mail in reply to a quote I gave the other day, and it has been accepted. £450 for some web design, more than enough for an iPod.

Going to Canterbury this evening, for the weekend. Fun fun fun!

Always liked the name of the hut round the back of Darwin College (Canterbury Uni), it's called 'The Missing Link' - that's where I'll be meetinig people when I get to there this evening.

The game was dull.. but had fun talking to friends.

Today I went on an eight mile walk along the beach. It was both fun and tiring, yet very gratifying to get exercise while enjoying myself. Plus it's become a little bit of a tradition to come down here and take walks along the beach, steadily moving further around the coastline every time (setting off for the walk from further along also, of course).

I have my first proper course session tomorrow, 'Windows 2000 - The Desktop' ... that'll be fun :/ - though there are only 4 students attending the session, so that should ease me into things gently.

Special day today!

The Win2K Desktop course today was a little boring, it's obviously a very basic course and so those attending it had limited skills... can't wait for tomorrow when I do a Word course.. should be dealing with a slightly more able group.

Went out for pizza this evening with family, then sat watching tv with a tub of ice cream.

Did more work on the code behind my weblog today. I made it so that I no longer need to manually edit the calendar each day to create a link to the days entry.. instead the calendar code now will automatically put links to entries where they exist. This means I only need to edit calendars at the start of each month to set the relevant values. Saves me a lot of work - plus I had fun learning to use modulo in php.

No training sessions today, but am going to help a user later who needs their bosses e-mail available alongside theirs in Outlook - as noone else seems to have sorted her out yet.

Made some more php changes, consolidating all repeated calendar info into a single function file, and streamlining each individual calendar down to the most minimal amount of data. This should make calendar creation/editing far less cumbersome - it is no longer the weakest part of my weblog code.

The weakest part would probably be the process of changing month, and creating the new folder and files that requires. That would probably be easier if there was a simple edit(file,param1,param2) command that let me edit change param1 into param2 in file. Instead I believe I have to read files into buffer, edit them there, then write out again, and I'm not inclined to do that yet.

Yet another powercut at home. This time before I woke up, and was still down by the time I left for work. This means my machine is offline and I can't get to it from work to do 'stuff'.

Went to ULU (University of London Union) bar to watch the rugby today (Australia beat Argentina), and on the way back, as I was walking through Birkbeck main building I spotted a former MSc colleague (Ellis) who deferred his project for a year and is now back working on it.

Woke up early this morning, with the rugby world cup on there's a reason to be getting up early.. and the reward is watching 4 matches in a row.

Rugby World Cup: England beat Georgia (84 : 6), though G played very well.

Experimenting with altering the entry format a little, hence this looks different to normal.

Testing a new comments system.. which you'll notice now is part of the weblog entry. Each day will correspond to a different set of comments. This allows people to comment on a certain days events. I even have a way to count comments.. though I am not sure if it is bug free.

Feel free to leave any comments on the new comments system, and the change over from the 'eyes' to red/green dots for the entry collapse/expand images.

A few days ago I started reading Monstrous Regiment, I only read it on the bus to and from work, so I am still reading it. It's a good book, though not as conventionally funny as most of his others, rather a sharp and witty 'novel' style of book. Which is my way of saying that it feels like a more serious piece of literature, which isn't to say I don't feel that way about his funny (haha) books.. just that I feel this one would appeal to a wider audience.. much in the same way that Small Gods is funny, and yet deals with serious issues, which I think was Pterry's turning point in the discworld.

Another course today, this is the first demonstration one though, instead of those attending each having a computer, they just sit and watch me, how boring for them.

Woke up this morning with an agonising cramp in my right calf muscle. Was rather annoying.. one just awakes and goes into shock at the agony. It's the second time this has happened to me in the past month or so. I've got a course to give today, and also have a headache.. so that should make everything so much fun.

Thankfully there were only 2 in the course, and they had more than half a brain between them, which meant things went well, they understood such things as right-clicking etc..

This evening will be a 'meet MSc mates' evening, otherwise know as M³.

I've worked out what the individual comments system is really good for... to show how no-one at all has any interest in commenting about my entries. Yay.

Went to a Filipino restaurant yesterday evening, was very enjoyable.

South Africa put up a hard struggle, but England held them off, conceded no tries, scored one themselves, and won 25 to 6.

My linux computer crashed several times yesterday/today and I think it is a hard drive failure. When I reboot, it sometimes fails to get me in, other times gets me in and then fails sometime later. I believe it's my old 15GB hard drive failing, so I have copied all important data (storage directory and user home directory) to my other hard drive in the machine. This should mean I don't lose much data when it fails for good. I have also ordered a new hard drive, it probably won't arrive for a week, so this could be a 'fun' week for me.

My home pc hasn't crashed since yesterday. I'm not sure if this is just random good luck, or a result of me moving my home directory from /home (on the bad hd) to /mnt/media/BACKUPS (on my good drive) and thus the bad hd receiving less read/write requests.

I have two classes to run today, the second of which is from 5:30pm to 7:30pm .. poor me.

Another late class like yesterday.. which was very very dull.. hopefully the students I have today will have more than one brain cell between them.

Actually my class yesterday evening was good, they didn't know much, but were keen and attentive.. and I had fun - shock horror! Another one tonight, the last one, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Apart from the evening (5:30-7:30) class, I am also giving an induction class from 4-5.

Both classes went well yesterday. Today I had to ring up CityLink (a parcel delivery company) about the delivery I am expecting (new hard drive). It seems they can only deliver during working hours in the week (DOH) or Saturday if I want to pay a fee. So right now they are trying to arrange with the senders (Scan) for delivery to my work place next Monday.

*grumble* Just had an e-mail from Scan telling me that delivery to my work address wil cost me an extra £10+VAT for the redirection.. I'm not keen on paying an extra fee.. so I'll have to see if I can have someone at home on Monday waiting for the package.

Nephew arrived today for what I believe will be a several day visit. He's such a cutie, not even two yet, but already he can name most of the letters on a keyboard. Though he pronounces 'W' by wiggling his tongue between his lips and making a blurbling sound.

Phenomenal rugby from Samoa, at one point they were leading England 10 to 0. It was a hard fought match, but in the end an English victory of 35 points to 22.

Just a powerpoint training session to give today, should be less boring than many others have been.

It was less boring, but with a cold/sore throat it wasn't that fun to give, talking lots == bad. However I'm having a relatively early end to the day (4pm) so I can go out and about with my nephew.

Have a bad cold today. And for some reaosn got dragged into a debate on slashdot about communism. I had many insightful things to say, and could replicate them here. But I am lazy.

Installed my new hard drive yesterday (it arrived at last) and my computer is back to being nice and usable.

What's worse than spam? Foreign language spam that you can't understand, of course!

My linux wishlist (what I'd need working in linux to not use windows aswell):

• support for my WinTV Nova-T USB digital TV card,
• full support for my dvd-rw burner.

Of course, should that ever happen, I'd still use the two machines, the second for watching TV or burning dvds - just so as not to affect performance on my primary PC.

It's incredible how a really fine and smooth houmous looks exactly like grout, still, makes a nice lunch spread onto crackers... the houmous that is.