For the last week I’ve been playing around with Twitter and been trying various clients, both on my desktop and on my phone; it has been surprisingly fun. After all of this fiddling around I have settled on two clients in terms of their speed, size and features.

Windows users in search of a good client and who do not want to install Adobe’s AIR package will not go far wrong with Bitter. These are some of its features:

• Supports Twitter, Plurk and Friend Feed
• Single column UI
• Shows unread tweet count
• Fast install
• Manage multiple accounts
• Twitter tweets, mentions, direct messages, and favourites
• Twitter group tweets
• Twitter search and hash tags
• Twitter screenname intellisense
• View Twitter user's profiles
• Powerful menus to allow you to reply, reply to all, direct message, retweet, copy tweets or link, and more
• Auto spell check
• Colour schemes
• Auto shrinks URLs
• Posts pictures to TwitPic
• Low memory usage

And this is what it looks like:

The best thing about it? It is free! Hooray! Go to the developers website to download it.

On my brilliant TG01 I have been using Panoramic moTweets. There as a free, advert supported version, but since you only have to pay $3.99 for the full version I’d really suggest shelling out the cash. Some of its features are:

• Support for multiple Twitter accounts
• Ability to upload pictures using your device’s camera or from the photo album
• Post your location manually or by using your device GPS
• Tiny URL and bit.ly Support
• Three (3) skin colors
• View Trends, Lists  and Conversations
• Finger friendly, kinetic scrolling menus
• Translate Tweets and Search Twitter topics with ease
• ReTweet, Follow, Unfollow, Direct messages, Replies and Favorites

This is what it looks like on my phone:

You can get the free version or pay for the ad-free offering on Panoramic’s website.

With these two programs you can Tweet to your heart’s content, whether at home, in the office, or on the move. Enjoy!

As I’ve mentioned, I generally use Opera Mobile 9.7 as the browser on my Toshiba TG01 Windows Phone. It is a really fast and transparently simple browser. The beta version of this that is on the Opera website does not work with the TG01, but if you go here you can download a more recent build that will work.

I like Opera Mobile so much I’ve been thinking for a while about trying the desktop version. Last night I downloaded and installed the 10.10 Beta and so far I am quite pleased with it. It supports ad blocking ‘out of the box’, has a spellchecker, will sync bookmarks across computers and comes with Opera Unite.

Opera Unite is a built-in file and web server in the browser. System administrators’ hair is probably curling at this point with horror about how insecure this is, but it seems quite handy to me. You can share your media files as well, which is quite nifty, so you can have your music collection anywhere you can connect to the internet.

So, do I have any general views on the best browser I’ve used? Much as I like Microsoft software, I only use IE8 in compatibility mode to connect to sites that code against the IE6 ‘standard’. I’ve been pretty happy with Firefox as a general browser, but as to whether Opera 10.10 is better I cannot yet say. I’ve set Opera to be my default browser and I’ll play with it for a few weeks.

I’ve spent much time playing with different web browsers on my TG01 (and the Xperia X1 before it) and, if I may, I’ll share some thoughts about them with you.

Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 was very good on the Xperia: fast, responsive and very good at rendering pages. Then I upgraded to the TG01 and found that there was a lot of screen corruption. I had to down-grade to Opera Mobile 9.5 beta 2. Unsurprisingly, Opera don’t have this on their website any more as it is an old version, so if you need it you’ll have to search for a torrent. The good thing about using 9.5 is it implements the ad-blocking urlfilter.ini which I have mentioned before. The irritating thing about this version is it uses the standard Windows Mobile onscreen keyboard by default and it is rather slow to change the keyboard each time you need to type something.

The other browser I regularly used on the Xperia was Iris 1.1.9. This is also no longer available for download as the maker has been purchased by a non-Windows Mobile friendly company. You can still find it on some download sites and there must be a torrent somewhere. I use Iris almost exclusively for viewing Google Reader. Iris pretends to be Safari on an iPhone (they both use the Webkit engine to render pages) so you get the good iPhone layout for Reader which works best on a mobile device.

I am a recent convert to the Netfront v3.5 brower for Windows Mobile Concept Version. The first thing you have to do when you install this is change the default font, the one it uses ‘out of the box’ is awful, but once you’ve done that you’ll find it is a fast, good-looking, capable browser which just zips along on the TG01.

Finally, after much fiddling about with other browsers for Windows Mobile I have, for the first time in a while, installed a non-IE browser on my desktop: Firefox 3.5 to be precise. The UI looks good and seems easy enough to get to grips with. Much as I like the ad-blocking feature of Opera Mobile I also love the Adblock Plus plug-in for Firefox. I’ll still use IE8 with some sites, but for the moment Firefox seems perfectly useful.

As my regular reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I am tempted to buy a new one, the Toshiba TG01. There are a few things that tickle my fancy about this phone: a 4.1inch 800x480 screen, a 1GHz CPU, a whizzy GPU and an accelerometer plus all of the other features of my current Xperia X1. However, it does not have a keyboard, it has an onscreen one.

The partner has constantly been going on and on to me about how I should be buying an iPhone as he likes his so much. One of the reasons I’ve given is that I don’t like onscreen keyboards. I also think the screen on the iPhone has a pretty ropey resolution. When I had my Nokia N800 internet tablet the first accessory I got for it was a Bluetooth keyboard. I briefly had an HTC Touch Diamond and didn’t really like it as it had an onscreen keyboard and even the larger one it came with that was designed for its high resolution display was poor.

Before all of these I had an i-mate Jasjar (a rebranding of the HTC Universal). OK, it was a brick, but I loved its high resolution display and its keyboard. Why did I stop using it? Because I knackered it installing custom ROMs. Ah well…

So has technology moved on far enough for onscreen keyboards to be useful? Some people think so, maybe I should give them another try. One of the good things about the TG01 is that it has USB host capabilities and Bluetooth so if I really want to type a lot I can attach a keyboard.

One of the things that strikes me about phones like the TG01, and I would include the iPhone in that list, is that they are mature, convergent devices. They are phones, media players, gaming devices, internet tablets, navigation tools, cameras, PIMs and work tools. Little, connected computers in your pocket, basically. Speaking as a superannuated toddler I remember when such things were science fiction.

My Eee PC was a fun little toy, but by no means reliable. Often it would fail to boot, or window borders would not appear, or the task bar would not load. Connecting to a new WiFi network would usually mean I would have to switch its WiFi connectively on and off a few times until it found the network. It had bugger all storage space and running more than a couple of programs at a time would leave it creaking. And, of course, it ran horrible, horrible Linux; such a 90s operating system.

So, I was thinking of getting a replacement when a generous offer arrived in my inbox. A £400 laptop, of reasonable spec running Vista Home Premium for £20 a month. This included a 3.5G modem and 3GB/month transfer. How could I turn down such an offer?

I have really enjoyed these past couple of days having a functional laptop that does everything I ask from it. It runs MS Office, my favourite blogging client (Windows Live Writer) and Trillian. I can sit in front of the television surfing away or chatting on IRC; I feel less bound to the dim and dingy computer room.

My long time reader will know I have a bit of a thing for gadgets. I have decided to get a super-gadget phone when they are released next month: an HTC Touch Diamond. It is pitched as an iPhone competitor, so you may wonder why I just don't get a 3G iPhone when they are released next month. Well, the Diamond has a higher resolution display, a faster processor and GPS-functionality, but more importantly, it will sync with my PC. At the moment, iPhones won't sync with 64-bit Windows, and that is what I run. I am not going to install a 32-bit OS just to sync a phone and lose a gigabyte of memory in the process. Moreover, I hate and despise iTunes, and that is the interface one has to use for syncing iPhones. The Diamond will sync with Outlook via the Mobile Device Centre in Vista (what used to be ActiveSync) which I will find terribly useful with my bulging contacts file and I can copy music and album art easily from Windows Media Player. Now all I have to do is wait a month. Waiting, aaargh!

After my last frenzy of installing applications on my Eee PC 700 2G Surf, I decided I wanted an RSS reader as well. I first tried RSSOwl, which is a Java application so it required the Java package installing. I found instructions to do that here. Sadly RSSOwl was total pants, so I deleted it. I left Java installed (even though it uses up a lot of SSD space) so I could run Java from inside the browser and other things I might install.

Then I decided to install the default Eee PC RSS reader, Akregator, which is included with the 4G version but not with the 2G Eee PC. If you followed the instructions to change the Eee PC 700 repositories to the 701 repositories it will show up when you load Synaptic package manager. This uses approximately a megabyte of SSD space so is small enough to install without any worries. It is also an excellent RSS reader. Its only failing that it doesn't seem to support Atom feeds. Works fine with all the RSS feeds I have thrown at it, though, and it has good controls for deleting old news so it doesn't fill up too much of your SSD.

Akregator sadly doesn't automatically install itself on the Launch menu of Full Desktop Mode: you can either run it using a terminal, the run command option on the Launch menu, or add it to the Launch menu manually. Do do this you right-click on the sub-menu of the Launch menu where you want it to live, 'Internet' would seem a good choice, and choose "Edit menu". The menu editor will appear, if you have the 'Internet' menu selected right-click on it and choose "New Item". You can name the RSS reader anything you like, but "Akregator RSS" or something similar would make sense, the description and comment don't matter. The command is "akregator" (all lower case, without the quotes, obviously) and the work path is "/usr/bin". If you want an icon you just have to click in the little image box in the top right and a selection of icons will appear, including one for akregator. Easy, eh?

Now I really cannot think of any more software I want to install on the Eee; just as well as I only have 200MB left on the internal SSD. If I decide to install anything else I am tempted to make them Java applications because I can just shove these on the SD card I have installed and use the menu editor as described above to point to the correct location and work path to run the application.

I've been playing more with my Eee PC; I decided to enable the full desktop mode rather than the usual toy interface. There are some very easy instructions for enabling full desktop mode here. However, they didn't work for me because I have an Eee PC 700 2G Surf (all that was in stock when I wanted to buy, and of course I had to buy instantly I'd saved up the cash). There is a simple solution to this, you need to change the repositories the Eee PC searches for when you try to get the required software. This is explained here. It is a simple case of loading the package manager and changing the '700' to '701' in the required places. The instructions say this causes problems with the keyboard but I didn't find that at all. Installing the required packages only uses up a few megabytes of the disk space so you can do it on the 2G model with no problems.

The full desktop mode looks a lot more like a real computer, and it means you can install extra applications and have them appear on the Launch menu. It does require a few more seconds to boot up, but not an onerous period of time. On the Eee PC 700 you will get a icon in the launch menu and on the task bar for Thunderbird Mail Client, but this is not installed on the Eee PC 700 so you can safely delete the icon. I suppose you could try to install Thunderbird, but I haven't looked into this yet so have no idea how to do it or how much disk space it uses up.

More: I didn't try to install Thunderbird, KDE Mail appeared on the package manager screen and I installed that. It works a treat. It is also worth installing AdBlock on your Eee PC so you don't waste time downloading adverts onto your tiny screen. With a decent email application, a good web browser, a blog client, Pidgin instant messenger and Skype on the device it makes it a highly useable computer for those on the go. At the moment I cannot think of any other software I need to install.

I've installed Scribefire on my Eee PC. This is a blogging client that works as a plugin for Firefox, so doesn't have any arcane system requirements that the Eee couldn't live up to. So far it seems very easy to use and has a good editing environment. Now will it manage to post this to my blog...

The Eee PC is a great toy. I've been blogging on the go and surfing the web from the train, boozers and generally anywhere I can find a table. There are really only two problems with it. Firstly, it doesn't support Bluetooth. One might have thought this would be a basic function of a portable device, but Asus clearly disagree. This means I have to connect my mobile phone via a USB cable, which I suppose is not too onerous; it does mean I get faster data transfer rates than Bluetooth when surfing on 3G*. Secondly, the battery life is total rubbish. This especially true of the Surf model I have, which comes with a lower capacity battery than the more well-endowed models. Any wifi use when on batteries shrinks the useable battery life to about two hours. This is pretty poor for a supposedly ultra-portable device. I will buy one of the higher-capacity batteries when they are released.

*Actually my N95 mobile phone when used with T-Mobile's Web'n'Walk plan supports HSPDA aka 3.5G, the faster version of 3G. It makes mobile internet use on the device a total joy. Instructions for connecting an N95 to T-Mobile's data plan can be found here. They are relatively easy but nowhere near as easy as this would be under Windows. Linux really is 90s software. In the instructions it says they have to be used on Advanced mode on the Eee PC but they work just fine under the normal mode of the Eee's OS. You can get a terminal up to type the arcane commands by going into the file manager and pressing Ctrl-T. Make sure you make backups of the various files you need to edit before and after you've edited (with different names for before and after, of course). The command is "sudo cp /etc/ppp/peers/dialup1 /etc/ppp/peers/dialup1.bak" to back up the first file you have to edit. Alter the paths and filenames as appropriate for the second file that needs editing and the after editing backup.

An Eee PC, it will replace my N800 which was always just too much of a toy to be generally useful. The Eee PC has a much better keyboard, and a bigger screen. If you are interested in a review there is one here. The only thing I don't like about it is that it runs Linux, which is generally fine for toys like this, but when one witnesses the arcane instructions required to connect it to my N95 mobile phone for 3G internet access it does become a tad tiresome. Not that I can be bothered to install Windows XP on it...

I've got the latest version of the blog software up and running, with only minimal incidence of unintelligible error messages, so there should be no problems accessing the site now.

I am upgrading to the latest version of my blog software, which requires me to move to an ASP.NET v2.0 capable server. There may be some downtime whilst this happens. Don't worry, you won't miss anything.

A new motherboard and my computer is back and more stable than ever. It even recognised my two RAID arrays even though it is a different model of motherboard and I plugged the drives into different SATA ports. Anyway, I'm back. More news as it happens.

But my computer has gone tits up. The motherboard died. I have a replacement in the post, so I'll be up and running in a few days. I really hope the RAID arrays survive switching to a new motherboard; I don't want to lose all of my files and have to re-install Vista.

I purchased something to test out my new throbbing power machine, the game Bioshock. It uses DirectX10 and the graphics are truly amazing when run at 1920x1200 resolution. I imagine they look pretty good at lower resolutions, but my computer can manage loony resolutions so why not? It seems like a really fun game; the world you play in is well-designed and interesting. If you want to see some screenshots then head over to that useful game review site IGN.

Thanks to the generosity of my normally tight-fisted father I have a new toy. A 3Ghz quad-core computer with 4GB 1066Mhz memory, an over-clocked 8800GTX and 1.8TB of hard disk space. This is it:

Yes, it has spinning lights, too.

I've done this blog entry before, but this time the keyboard has only lasted two years rather than nine. It is also a lot cleaner than that very old one, look:

Well, perhaps not that much cleaner:

I've replaced it with exactly the same type of keyboard.

You can turn yourself into a Springfield resident at Simpsonizeme.com. Here I am as a one-year old, I am sure you can see the resemblance.

Readers from last month may recall I got Skype working on my Nokia N95 mobile phone thanks to a program called Fring. This was all very well and good, but connection via Wifi on the N95 eats batteries like there is no tomorrow. It is also not so good for text-based chats/Instant Messages on a mobile phone keypad. Well, help has arrived in the form of the latest firmware update for my Nokia N800 Internet Tablet; it now supports Skype. The batteries of the N800 last a lot longer when connected via Wifi so it should be easier to make and receive calls when in range of a Wifi hotspot. Since I have a Bluetooth keyboard for my N800 I should also find it much easier to use the IM functionality of Skype, something I use quite a lot. The only problem with the firmware update is that it requires one to re-install all of one's applications. This is not as bad as it seems for if you have been diligent and made backups the settings for most of the programs will be retained (note the emphasis on 'most', as in: not all). The firmware upgrade also allows one to use SD cards with a greater capacity than before, so this is a boon for those who want to carry around a lot of music (like me) or videos. Mind you, I already have five gigabytes of music on mine, I don't really need that much more...

Last night I was building bloody Ikea furniture. I hate, hate, hate building flat-pack furniture so much. Not only did it get me distressed, really uptight and stinking, but it also resulted in me going to bed at 3am. It is now just past 5am. Fantastic. I'm going to be in a great mood today, I can tell. There is a bookshelf to build today, freaking great. At least being able to try out a new program has distracted me enough so I haven't burned myself this morning (yet).

I am using Microsoft Live Writer to make this post. It may only still be in Beta, but it connects to dasBlog blogs a treat and does things like check your spelling, has a proper WYSIWYG editor and uploads photos for you. The editor in dasBlog is not ideal; whereas this seems the best blogging tool I've used. Certainly better than Maemo Blog on my Nokia N800 which served me so well when blogging from the loony bin. That is very much a work in progress, though.

Oh, by the way, I hope you like the new layout of the blog. I thought it was time for a change. That tiny font of the old design was such a swine to read when crying.

I went to bed an hour early and slept until half-three so things have improved a bit with the increased dose of anti-depressants (they are supposedly very sedating). Now all I need them to do is start cheering me up as I am still not terribly happy. I wonder how good the new anti-psychotics are, though, as I am still having unpleasant hallucinations and my paranoid delusions are really quite colourful.

As a side note to last night's Wifi fun with my Nokia N95 phone; it works a treat but leaving Wifi on all the time sucks the battery dry terribly quickly. Leaving Skype/Fring running over Wifi permanently just cannot be done. I even tried lowering the Wifi broadcast power to see if that would increase the battery life, but no dice. It will have to be a case of connecting when I want to make an international call. I will see how the battery lasts on my N800 when Skype comes out for that. I think both my N95 and N800 are great; obviously toys in some ways, but terribly useful. I would have been so utterly unhappy in the loony bin without the contact they allowed me to have.

I gave up trying to sleep at half-three. Brilliant. Oh how that cheers me up.

I was having problems getting the Wifi function of my Nokia N95 phone to work. It would not connect to my DG834GT router at all. I kept getting messages about 'Invalid shared WPA keys' when trying to connect to the internet even when I had entered the WPA key correctly. I found the solution in post number three by Plx here. I can now connect problem-free to my Wifi router, and hopefully other people's as well (assuming I have the network key or they are unprotected access points).

Why did I want to do this when I have such a high transfer bandwidth from T-Mobile on my Web'n'Walk package? Well, my internet connection bandwidth cannot be used for VoIP programs like Skype, I paid for the cheaper option that didn't allow this. IRC, email and IM programs had served me well in the loony bin last week, but for making international calls it would be nice to be able to use my Skype account over a Wifi network. It is planned for Skype to come out for my Nokia N800 at some point this summer, but as yet there is no word about exactly when.

Luckily, I was searching forums about the N95 and someone linked to Fring. At first glance this is just another IM program that lets you connect to many networks (GoogleTalk, MSN and Twitter). However, it also allows you to connect to the Skype and use your SkypeOut account to make calls to any number in the world cheaply, as well as just calling other Skype users for free. Of course, other Skype users can call you (when you are connected to a Wifi network). I had Skype working on my N95 via Wifi! No need to wait for the N800 version (although I'll install that when it arrives).

So now I can do IRC, IM and email on the N800 using Wifi or connected to my Web'n'Walk via Bluetooth and cheap international calls via Wifi on my N95. Pretty cool, eh?

I saw the boss-lady psychiatrist yesterday. She agreed to take me off the drug that is keeping me awake. Sadly, the dose will have to be gradually lowered over several days, but hopefully this means sleep will come soon.

She has also prescribed me a short-term course of clonazepam, a tranquiliser, to help me deal with the incredible anxiety I feel being locked up. To be honest, it barely scratches the surface of the terror that is my life, but even a slight improvement is welcome.

Amazingly, the nurses also were bothered to go and get my anti-depressants yesterday, so maybe I will begin to feel less miserable.

Feeling miserable, and sadly suicidal, is still a problem, though. Today I want to negociate for the return of my belt, shoelaces and earphones, so I will have to be very careful what I say. I will have to stress how much getting my medication sorted out has perked me up. Oh, and avoid saying I am as miserable as sin and if I am left alone with a bottle of cyanide I'll swallow it instantly. I do not think there is terribly much cyanide on the ward, though.

I suppose I am happy that I have my Nokia N800 and N95 to keep in contact with the outside world, and having Butter to cuddle as I lie awake at night helps a lot as well.

Some friends are going to visit this evening and I cannot express how pleased I'll be to see them. I'll ask them to dress as washer women and smuggle me out in their basket of washing.

So the fifteen hours I was quoted to get a bed expired, and I exploded in a highly articulate outburst and attempted to leave the bin. Nearly managed it too until I got intercepted by a very friendly doctor who said he would get me a bed within five minutes if he had to carry one up himself. So that was the bed situation sorted out.

Soon afterwards it was half ten and time for medication. My drug chart had been written up at five in the morning so they had plenty of time to get my drugs in. Naturally, none of them were to be found. Cue explosion number two.

Luckily, I had scored the phone number of the friendly doctor and rang him up. He could not get my sedating anti-depressant, but he did give me 5mg of nitrazepam. I went out like a light and slept until six. Sleep! Real sleep! How I love it. I think it has made me feel a tiny bit happier.

I have to say it has been great having my N800 here for blogging, IRC and IM`ing people. The bin would be worse without it, even if it is hard typing on a bed.

At the end of last month I got a Nokia N800 internet tablet to replace my old portable internet device. I've been terribly pleased with it, it is quite useful and there is a load of free software available for it including a blogging app that I am using to write this.

However, for surfing the web when not in range of a Wifi hotspot one needs to make a Bluetooth connection to a phone and connect over a cellular network. I didn't think this would be a problem until I spoke to my old mobile phone service provider and they said the highest data transfer limit I could get on my (not terribly cheap) tariff was four megabytes a month; this is also known as 'piss all'.

So I cancelled my contract instantly and switched to wonderful T-Mobile who give three gigabytes of data transfer for a little over an Ayrton* a month. This is pretty much all a wired toddler could want in a month when staggering about to playgroup and the like. I got the middle data plan; there is a cheaper one for £7.50 that doesn't allow one to use IM programs and a more expensive one that allows the use of VoIP programs like Skype. Since the voice part of my tariff allows an obscene amount of calls to be made I don't need to bother with the Skype option.

Of course, switching mobile providers means normally gets a new phone, and what a marvellous new phone I have. It is a Nokia N95. This has some nifty toys built in: a five mega pixel camera, a decent music player (it supports four gigabyte micro-SD cards for holding music and pictures), high speed HSDPA 3G data access for surfing the web (either from the phone or from the N800) and a GPS with mapping software. I admit, I've only used the GPS twice (I now know exactly where I and the neighbours live), but it is quite amusing none the less. I've downloaded an application called Mobile GMaps that integrates with Google Maps and the GPS so you can track your position using overhead satellite pictures as well as more traditional maps. It is a great phone and I heartily recommend it to anyone looking for a new blower. There is a good review on The Register if you want to know more.

Sadly, fun as it is to have new toys, I am still pretty freaking miserable.

---

*Ayrton Senna = Tenner

I've been using Windows Vista for a while now and I really like it. The only thing that I do not really go for is the Sidebar and its associated gadgets. Worst of all is the bundled RSS reader. It is too small, cannot have its size changed, displays news aggregated from all feeds you subscribe to (rather than displaying feeds separately) and has hardly any options to change, certainly none that address these problems.

As a consequence I gave up on Windows Sidebar and have gone back to a program I used on XP, Desktopsidebar. Not only does this have a great, highly configurable RSS reader built in, it can also be extended with an array of plug-ins that are far better than the ones currently available for Windows Sidebar. You can change its look and feel with Skins. I am glad I've installed it again.

The excellent Charlie Brooker has commented on how he hates Macs (and their latest advertising campaign) in his column for the Guardian; it is terribly funny. Also quite funny is the contextual advertising at the side of the article. His program on BBC Four, Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, is a lot of fun as well.

Today's thrill has been to update my blog software to the latest version. Whoopee. I can now moderate comments. Possibly other things too.

I was unsure about my partner installing a pre-release operating system, but it looked so good that I have installed RC1 of Windows Vista. It was a pain in the arse to get running, thanks to some beta drivers, but now it is installed it looks and runs great. The Aero Glass UI is a real looker. Most of my software seems to run fine on it apart from Nero, which is a bit of a pain.

My partner has installed the latest build of Windows Vista on his computer as the main operating system. I do not think it is incredibly wise to use an unfinished operating system day to day, but I have to admit it looks great. The new Aero UI is very beautiful. I'll certainly be installing it when Microsoft get their act together and finish it.

A couple of days ago I downloaded release candidate 1 of Internet Explorer 7; I've been very pleased with it so far. It has plenty of new security features and adheres to web standards, but I am really pleased it supports tabbed browsing. I used to often use Firefox because of its tabbed browsing, but I found it slow, unreliable and full of memory leaks. I am glad to be able to dump it in favour of a more reliable browser.

My partner has been working late all week and he generally leaves the flat at an hour I am not fit to converse with him. I miss him. The neighbours are both working at the moment so I cannot go around there for a bit of company. I'm really lonely.

The crap with the graphics cards really annoyed me and this has been followed by more chaos with the computer today; I have faulty memory that I must replace.

I'm also broke. Bank charges have wiped out my income for this week so it has been a spell of minimal expenditure on fun things (like dinner). This also makes it hard to buy stuff to get the computer back to a perfectly functioning state.

The voice I hear and the visual hallucinations are really bad. I can see quite a large crowd of people standing outside my flat screaming abuse at me. Of course, no one else can see them as they are not really there.

All of this has resulted in me feeling pretty crappy, and today and yesterday I harmed myself. Nothing serious but I haven't self-harmed in weeks so I also feel dreadful that I am doing it again.

My hope of salvation comes in the form of visiting the gym. I went there today and expended energy on an exercise bike and a rowing machine (at least I still fit into my Oxford college rowing kit). I felt most drained after doing this. The hope is getting a decent amount of exercise will make me feel generally happier. I find the walk to the gym to be terrifying, though, thanks to my hallucinations. We shall see how things progress, but I do find it a bit of a hard old job having schizophrenia.

The graphics cards have been returned. Not new or repaired graphics cards, just the old ones sent back by return of post. They still don't work. The bastards.

I now have to contact the suppliers again and find out what in the name of arse they think they are doing. I am vividly incandescent with rage.

Today I am performing one of those tedious activities that we all have to endure from time to time, namely waiting in all day for a parcel to be delivered.

We do have a concierge who will accept deliveries, and courier companies often deliver straight to them rather than bothering to find out if anyone is home. The concierge doesn't bother to tell anyone when parcels have arrived, so it is a case of going to see them at five o'clock if I have heard nothing from the courier.

It is better to be in, just in case the courier can be bothered to deliver the parcel to the delivery address. Couriers cannot stick a card through the door if I am out as they cannot gain entry to the building without me being there to answer the entry-phone system.

I hope they come soon, I am expecting fun things. My 7800GT graphics cards went tits up and these are replacements. Soon I can return to the power of whizzy SLI graphics cards. Hooray!

I'm feeling a bit fragile at the moment so imagine my delight when I turned my computer on yesterday only to find it had gone tits up. It wouldn't boot or respond to any key-presses. This took a day of removing bits and replacing them, reinstalling operating systems and generally farting around to get it working again. I was severely vexed, I don't mind telling you. It seems to be working fine now; I can get back to toddler-esque rants.

I appear to be losing weight; quite quickly as I am hardly eating anything. Bit of a spanner in the works tonight, though, as I am going out for dinner.

It is going to be one of those events in which being the 'friend who knows about computers' is my meal ticket. I have to advise someone on a laptop to buy. Bit of a challenge this as I've never purchased a laptop and my friend will have even less of an idea than me about what he needs. Still, it gets me out of the flat and hopefully noshing some decent food. I don't mind saying that eating nothing does make me quite hungry.

As I mentioned, I was moving my registrar for this domain. Apparently it all happened with no loss of service; isn't technology marvellous?

I've got to extend the registration of my domain names and I've decided to move to a cheaper registrar. I've never done this before so it might mean my domain disappears for a bit, but I shall return.

I am just testing to see if I can post blog entries from my PDA. If I can I salute the mystic power of mobile internet access.=

My groovy i-mate Jasjar has been returned to me. Well, I am not sure it is that groovy as it is quite large and I look a bit of an arse when I hold the large block up to my ear to make calls. What I am still yet to try is the wi-fi ability it has. I am hoping to be able to update the spume of drivel when I am on the go thanks to its wireless ability. Not that really much happens to me when I am out and about, but rest assured if something amusing happens whilst I am in range of a hot-spot you, dear reader, will be the first to read my toddler-esque rantings.

About dasBlog, it upgrades really easily and works. This time.

My groovy, and passably reliable, blog software has been upgraded. This is always a bit of a heart in mouth operation for me as I recall my entire site going tits up during one such upgrade. Needless to say, it should be painless, but things somehow have the habit of going wrong when I attempt them in my toddler-esque, ham-fisted manner. Apologies if the site disappears soon after I post this.

The blog has received under half the number of hits this month compared with previous months. I thought it was simply because it is very dull. Turns out my oh-so-clever blog software has been blocking people coming from my homepage to here. D'oh! Fancy blocking a referrer page in the same domain. Well done, dasBlog, that is very clever.

Sadly, Bulldog Broadband are not terribly beautiful; their website doesn't suggest they are anyway. One month after placing an order with them for a new line in my new flat they make an appointment for an engineer to come around yesterday morning. I sit around all day like a ham sandwich at a Jewish wedding waiting for the swine who doesn't turn up and doesn't even have the courtesy to ring and say he cannot be arsed to turn up. There was much holding of breath until something was done, and what was done was ringing Bulldog and having a highly articulate outburst. Can it really take over a month to get a new telephone line and an 8mb connection plumbed in in one of the richest cities in the world? Clearly it can.

Often as I stand in the queue to pay at the supermarket I look at my shopping and wonder what story it tells about me. After I've finished crying/laughing/looking ashmed I pay and head off on my way back home with my minimum of three packets of sherbet flying saucers plus other less important stuff.

With today's look at the logs I note that people have found my site this month using the following phrases:

37 different keyphrases	Search	Percent
ab/dl	12	21.4 %
url commentview software	3	5.3 %
people with aids plaza	3	5.3 %
bread intolerance	2	3.5 %
plastic pants	2	3.5 %
toddler blog	2	3.5 %
tight plastic pants	2	3.5 %
nill illigitimi carborundum	1	1.7 %
why put off tomorrow what you can do today	1	1.7 %
picky toddler eaters	1	1.7 %
mr charles bradlaugh mp for northampton	1	1.7 %
blog disclaimer	1	1.7 %
what is the relationship of cocktail temperature and people?	1	1.7 %
03 pinot blanco	1	1.7 %
ab/dl 21 only	1	1.7 %
drunk man ebay onion	1	1.7 %
road to excess leads to	1	1.7 %
thumb in my mouth	1	1.7 %
what can you give a toddler 22 months for gas	1	1.7 %
plastic night pants	1	1.7 %
ab/dl	1	1.7 %
pictures from the 20twenty final	1	1.7 %
ab/dl sites	1	1.7 %
picky eaters toddler	1	1.7 %
grades of toro sushi	1	1.7 %
tight fitting plastic pant	1	1.7 %
url commentview hardware	1	1.7 %
toddler jealousy	1	1.7 %
3 o clock is too late or too early to do anything	1	1.7 %
ab&dl	1	1.7 %
humiliation nappies	1	1.7 %
toddler boy hair styles	1	1.7 %
ab dl blog	1	1.7 %
coldest summer i ever	1	1.7 %
nuk medic	1	1.7 %
ab toddler	1	1.7 %
search for fifty ways to say good job to a toddler	1	1.7 %

 

What in the name of Butter does this say about me and the spume of drivel? Probably that it is a spume of drivel....

Sorry entries are spasmodic at the moment; I am staggeringly ill.

I have yet another new toy, one of those new-fangled dual core Athlon 64 processors. The phrase, "In the name of arse and by all that it is evil that is fast" just about covers it. I an now play multiple copies of Teletubbies games at the same time without them slowing down. Hooray!

Latest version of the blogging software gives me a fun new skin/theme. I might change it in half an hour, but it looks fun enough for now. dasBlog is a really good bit of software if you have ASP.NET hosting and plenty of time to kill.

The old mouse was not as caked in filth as the old keyboard, but I got a new one anyway: an Apple Mighty Mouse. A no-button mouse, oooohhh spooky! It is pleasingly small, but does find it a bit difficult to tell the difference between left and right clicks. It is pretty sexy as computer hardware goes, far sexier than SQL Server 2005 I installed earlier....

Well, some things are not always clean, but this lovely thing is:

Yes, it is an Apple keyboard on my Windows box. I may hate Apple's OS (awful to program multi-threaded applications, and hardly whizzy processors come to think of it) but they do design damned-sexy things. It is a nice keyboard, cheers Apple!

After nine years, almost to the very day, I am waving goodbye to an old friend: the keyboard from my first PC. Here it is just before I send it off on a flaming longboat into the Thames:

That picture gives a pretty good idea why I am dumping my old beast. This picture might give a better idea:

I did choose the dirtiest corner of the keyboard, but it is not so much dirtier than the rest. Honestly, it is really filthy. For all the funny, lewd and profitable words I've bashed out on it, it is disgusting and must be retired.

I just have not been in the mood to get very, very drunk of late. So I still have not had any good ideas as to what to put on toddlerism.com. I still favour some form of rant, but I need to think of both a theme and some relevant jokes. It'll come to me in the end.

It appears someone was searching on Yahoo.com for information about the phrase "Why put off until tomorrow that which can be done today?" Clearly, I am flattered and staggered that the spume of drivel comes top in that search, but I am highly amused by the entry that hits the top-spot. Obviously, once this entry has been up for a few days the search rankings will change. So, Mrs. Treliis from North Wales, hit that link quickly to remember what you and you alone read but a few months ago and marvel once more at my minuscule weight gain.

Domain names can be purchased at such incredible discounts compared to the dark, dim days when both the interweb and I were toddlers. As a consequence of these bargains if I keep buying them I'll be a millionaire! I feel it would be worth the effort to think of something to put on this one, at the very least. Some form of rant, perhaps....

We all have things that we like very much. For example, I am a huge fan of Burgundy. It is important that we recognise our likes and dislikes and not be blinded into sloppy-thinking by them. Only last year I was presented a glass of wine with no idea what it was after much sniffing, swirling and swilling I confidently claimed, "Well, this is quite big, but has a pleasing degree of refinement. Since most Australian Chardonnay tastes like oak-ridden lighter-fluid I think this is probably a good bottle of French Chardonnay. Possibly Grand Cru Chablis from a producer who likes oak." Seconds later when I was told it was Sorrenberg Chardonnay I was delighted; not only because it was a lovely and well-priced bottle of wine but also because my hideous prejudices had been caught out.

Much the same is true with software. I am a reasonable fan of the works of Microsoft; Windows XP is an easy, powerful operating system and their recent programming languages are terribly pleasing if one can generate enthusiasm for that kind of thing. Yet, some people seem to have balanced personalities (ie. a chip on both shoulders) when it comes to using Microsoft software. They buy it, use it with rarely a significant problem (even though they may never download updates) yet despite this successful experience they whine like dysfunctional teenagers about them. They will berate Microsoft and yet praise other software companies producing niche-market applications even when they behave in completely the same way.

An example. I am a generally happy user of Firefox for some of my interweb browsing requirements, yet in the four or five months since I first installed it I have had to download four updates, the first two of which required me to completely uninstall the old version before installing the new one. Clearly, this is a tad irritating, but nothing terribly burdensome. Yet, Microsoft's monthly patches merit streams of incoherent abuse from the hard-of-thinking about how terrible it is that they cannot write perfect software that meets the needs of 90+% of all desktop users in the world the first time around. Hmmmm...

Not only are these updates for Firefox accepted by the critics of Microsoft, they are praised for quite the most bizarre reasons. An experienced programmer (who should know better) said to me the other day, "Well, with Firefox there are not as many problems as IE which is so easy to hack and at least with Firefox they do not wait until the problems have been found before they are fixed". I shall assume he meant something else apart from the hilariously howling logical error he trotted out (how can one fix a problem if one does not find it first?) and concern myself with his first comment. It is wrong. In the last six months of 2004 the well-known company Symantec found more security flaws in Firefox than in IE. Not only has it had more security flaws in recent times but also we are told by the youth with too much time on his hands who found one of the recent ones that, "The assumption that IE is easier to exploit is a common misconception. IE has become quite tough and it is very difficult to find venerabilities in it." Strangely, he used techniques that used to work with IE (but do not any more) to find the hole in Firefox.

You will note that I do not claim for a second that all Microsoft programs are utterly perfect or that the company is above indulging in the under-hand tactics that every other company feels they can get away with. Microsoft are one of many big companies so they try and make money by pleasing their customers and by stiffing their opposition as much as they can manage. If this seems a surprise to some people then perhaps they need to just check up on how companies other than Microsoft behave and what the average bear's toilet habits tend to be.

We all like many things but we have to recognise their flaws as well as their functionality. I love Riedel glasses far more than nasty Spiegelaus but I recognise that one can put the very best Spiegelaus in the dishwasher with little chance of them exploding (and they cost less to replace if they do) whereas Riedels have to be washed by hand (with a reasonable chance of them exploding even if you give them a hard stare). I am sure that in some ways Apple's new and whizzy version of the ancient Unix operating system is better than Windows, but it also has security flaws that need fixing and is not used by that many people so personal familiarity is lower and getting free support from your next-door neighbour is harder (for some people all software needs free support). Screaming incoherent abuse at people because OS X is better than Windows XP or Riedels are better than Spiegelaus is more likely to make one look unthinking and boorish rather than result in making friends and influencing people.

Woefully boring people who insist on parroting other people's humourless constructions such as "M$" or "Microshaft" may as well be parroting the Nicene Creed; even though it is contemptible at least it has a bit of historical background and has provided many people with a sanctimonious glow in the past.

Everyone with an email account has had someone try and steal money from them, be it phishing or emails from the daughter of the ex-king of Matabeleland, yet someone has just tried something really rather blatant with me.

In my quest for a game in English for my lovely new PSP I trawled through Ebay and found what seemed a vaguely reasonable deal for a game with very fast delivery. "It shall be mine", I thought. I put in my bid, won the item and attempted to pay immediately using the power of PayPal. It informed me that the seller was unable to accept payments; odd, I thought, as this person claimed to prefer PayPal and expected payment within three days. I contacted her and she claimed some minor problem with PayPal that would be sorted out within three days.

Four days later I get an email saying her PayPal account would not be working for many weeks, would I care to pay her "cousin's" PayPal account that is registered in a different country? No, I would not. A look back at her profile showed that many people had experienced much the same over the past several weeks, but only got around to placing feedback in the last couple of days, weeks after their auctions had ended. I was a little surprised by the lack of civic-responsibility these delays demonstrated. I was even more surprised when I contacted these people and found out that no one had bothered tell Ebay that that this person was breaking the terms and conditions of trading on Ebay, if not being an outright crook.

With a little prompting, several factual emails describing this person's trading style and the many PayPal accounts she into which she tried to siphon money were sent. Now there is one more thief removed from Ebay, and my game has arrived from another source for less money. I recognise that there will always be people out there who will try and take advantage of the hard of thinking, but if slightly more cognitively-enhanced people notice this it would seem a touch rude not to stop them, especially when it takes fabulously little effort.

My computer, that is, but I still feel it would be acceptable to hold hands and dance around the lilac toadstool of love....

New, ultra-whizzy memory appears to have done the trick; I have spent the day stressing all of the components and it does seem very stable. The number of binary-logic operations I've done today truly boggles the mind.

Doing all of these calculations has once again demonstrated the incredible power of modern computers and therefore the utter brilliance of humanity. If people can create devices that can churn numbers so well and still make them cheaply enough for me to afford, perhaps humanity is not going down the toilet quite yet. It may be that large sections of humanity resist the idea that they have any intellectual capacity at all and view the word 'clever' as an insult, but without a shadow of a doubt we are a bunch of smart cookies! Revelling in it seems perfectly fine to me.

No entries here for a few days on the grounds of my computer going tits up. It turns out that the memory I had purchased was just not up to scratch; much random crashing eventually resulted in trashing my operating system. Needless to say, this was vastly annoying. All of this down to buying something on the grounds of it being 'cheap and functional'.

I feel terrible that I have been sucked into this laughable way of thinking. I have often stated that 'cheap' does not necessarily equate with 'good'. I remember visiting an associate and he suggested we go out for dinner as he knew a place worth going to. "Is it good?" seemed like a reasonable question to ask. "Oh yes," he replied, "It is all you can eat for nine dollars." I had to respond, "I didn't ask if it was cheap, I asked if it was good." He said, "Well, the food is not very good, but I do not like paying for food." I do not feel the need to return there.

There is no reason why good things have to be expensive, but mindlessly choosing the cheapest thing is a false economy at best and worthy of contempt at worst. As Kingsley Amis said, nice things are nicer than nasty things; I am willing to pay a few extra pence for a product of real quality. Especially if it means my computer works reliably and result keeps me free from explosive rage...