It snowed a bit today, didn't stick though. Still bitterly cold...

I finally got my second rental DVD from dvdsontap.com. Not only did it take too long to arrive, but I can't play it. After looking at it I can understand why, it's pretty badly scratched. So I decided that it's not worth the effort and I've cancelled my (so far free) subscription. Bah. I think I'd rather spend the �7.99 a month on a cheapo DVD from Play.com than fanny about with rentals.

I've put a tagboard on the homepage and tidied it up a bit. Leave a message if you want, that's what it's there for. And it's sooo much easier than having a forum. (I'm right lazy, me)

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Shorts

I'm not in the mood to write long ramblings tonight - too tired - so you'll have to put up with brief snippetts instead.

The flood water continues to drain slowly away. The (really, really) cold weather meant that we had an ice rink in the back garden today. Hopefully it will clear soon enough. Anyone want to buy some sand bags?

I'm meeting up with one of my oldest friends, Russell on Thursday for his 30th Birthday drinks. He's having them close to his home in East London which is pretty sensible from his point of view, but it does mean we have to somehow make our way all the way across London and back. Bit of a nasty journey, what with London's public transport being what it is (esp. as it's not near to an underground station) but we're making the effort because it's his Birthday.

After my dabblings at searching for my own name on Google we had a bit of a laugh at work today when one of my colleagues found a wrestler who shares his name. He even has a catchphrase - "you wouldn't want to run into this". Er, quite.

I've been in contact with a couple of old friends via Friends Reunited. Quite funny to see what people look like now / what they have been up to etc. I'm going to try and meet up with one of my old mates from the old apprenticeship days when I next go down. We used to go clubbing quite a lot together and it would be great to see him again. He's got two kids now and seems quite happy with life.

I'm currently listening to a wicked mix from the Solid Steel website. (If you don't know what I'm on about and like your music, get over there pronto!)

The DeCSS case came to a close today with a victory for Norwegian Jon Johansen (yay!)

I picked up a fantastic Peter Kay calendar in the Reading Virgin (so-called) Megastore yesterday for a bargain 99p. January's image is "Garlic Bread?". That won't mean much if you haven't seen Live At The Top Of The Tower but it's become a bit of a catchphrase...

I got an email back from my Secret Santa. Turns out he did buy me something but it got lost somewhere along the way. I blame the Post Office - I reckon I've had stuff go missing before but I can't prove anything. I'm definitely going to complain about this though.

Finally, if you're a bit of a geek like me and want to read an interesting essay on the history of operating systems (or are doing some research, or you're twelve years old and only know about Windows XP or iMacs) then you really should read In The Beginning Was The Command Line by one of my favourite authors, Neal Stephenson.

When I started using the 'net (way back in '94!) I can remember that occasionally you would do a search in Altavista or Yahoo and you would get no results. Today I was trying to remember when that last happened... And have you seen how many pages are indexed by Google? As of right now it's 3,083,324,652 web pages. That's three billion, eighty three million pages, in case you didn't read it right. Back in 94 it looked like Altavista were going to rule the search engine world, Google hadn't even been born, now eveyone I know uses Google and wouldn't even think of using anything else. Weird, huh?

Before I go, a quick invitation to visit my homepage and leave me a tag message. Cheers.

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