Gracie’s Life Experiment

Started rewriting my personal website last night and continued this morning before work (v naughty - didn’t get in till after 10am).  I think I wrote my first website back in 2000.  I don’t think my programming skills have improved much but I am getting better at doing the graphics.  It’s not that I don’t have the skills, but I just haven’t had to program anything for so long I can’t even remember how to start (hang my head in shame)!!   My personal website was created in 2003, originally hosted on brinkster (cos it was free) and last updated in 2005 - hmm a bit out of date as it didn’t even contain stuff about our furry baby Mocha or the wedding!  Also it had… shock horreur… frames.  It’s funny how things go in and out of fashion.  When I was first learning about websites frames were very de rigeur, now they are shunned by almost everyone.  We have our own server at home now so I can load things up nice and quickly and if it breaks hubby will go hit it with a hammer (the official Physicist’s solution) I would prob Ctrl+Alt+Del and reboot.

Summary of the day:  Played with my website, Went to work, Printed out a whole tree’s worth of handouts (I have a lecture to give to 40 students tomoz), Caught up with emails, Lugged all the stuff home, Made an “interesting” potato gratin (somehow it baked for an hr and the potatoes were still a bit raw), Played with website again (doing the boring bit with all the photo galleries).

This week’s 10 things are random statistics from my blog (as of today).

1. 133 Posts
2. 24 Comments
3. 18 Spam Comments
4. 234 Hits on 25/09
5. 2 Days with No Posts
6. 19 Categories
7. 165 Tags
8. 700 Hits on One Page
9. 178 Word Average per Post
10. 13 Ping Backs

Summary of the day:  Work again, Analysed questionnaires, Created summary presentation, Made Cassoulet for dinner

We bought our Nintendo Wii back in June.  At the time I found one in Argos and they had an offer where you got £10 off Wii Play (which included another wiimote) think it was about £205 for the console, Play and Sports.   We don’t seem to play it as much these days but it’s great when we have people over.  We have a small selection of games (Sport, Play, Harry Potter OOTP, Far Cry, Wario Smooth Moves , and hopefully The Simpsons for Christmas).  Wii Sport kept my parents occupied (mostly the golf game).

Strange how there seems to be a big rush for Wiis in the runup to Christmas.  They haven’t been overly plentiful in stock over the year, but they weren’t hard to find over the summer.  If we hadn’t got one, I would prob have held out for the next version of Wii (think it’s coming out some time next year) which plays DVDs as well.

Summary of the day: Work, 2 student meetings, Catching up with emails, Extremely large fish (with some chips and bean juice - I like the baked bean sauce but not the actual beans), Supermarket shopping for last minute stuff, Had a dinner party with steamboat, Played trivial pursuits (I won - w00t) and then Mario Smooth Moves (v surreal graphics).

I think I am actually addicted to Facebook (signed up in Feb this year and it’s slowly built into a full blown addiction).  Even though I know that nothing has happened (i.e. I have no emails notifying me) I still find myself checking it whenever I’m bored (which today was about 10 times as I was off sick from work).  So, what is this addiction and why?  Is it really because I just can’t wait to see if someone has been bothered to do something, or could it be that I just want to see if I actually have any friends to validate my social networking skills?  Eventually I’m sure I will get bored of it or get invited one too many times to become a vampire/werewolf/pirate/ninja/whatever.  What’s with all the poking too?  First there was normal poking (soon got bored, but still end up poking people back once in a while), there’s also superpoke (the more you poke, the more types of poke you get with little piccies), then there are a whole load of other X me, Super X me, Superduper X me Pro type ones where you can do virtually anything to anyone.  Then there’s also those gift type ones (where you give other people things; plants, stars, fish, eggs, etc) which annoy me as I don’t really want to clutter up the profile with them, yet every week I seem to get something really random or other (always seemingly from a relative for some reason).

So, what I’d really like to know is are there certain psychological profiles/categories of people based on the types of applications/usage of facebook?  Wouldn’t that be interesting, they already collect all your usage stats, an interesting social networking experiment theory there.

Summary of the day: Woke up - couldn’t speak, Stayed home from work, Made some buk poh, Slept, Played on facebook, Answered emails, Slept some more, Cried a bit (feeling miserable and ill), Cursed at students for making me ill, Ate an entire box of throat pastilles in one afternoon, Got an abstract accepted for yet another conference

So I’ve been a happy internet banker for the last ten years.  Randomly last week my account details weren’t being accepted (strange as I use a money manager hence know that the details entered hadn’t change).  So I re-register in case it’s randomly forgotten (on 3 of my different computers).  5 days later the new details come and they don’t work either.  Telephone banking doesn’t work either.  Spend 30 mins on the phone this morning and can’t get through the security check (answered 5 questions, then was stumped by the last question about the month and year the account was opened - who can remember that after such a long time?).  I was seriously beginning to think that my account had been hacked so went down to the bank.  All they told me was that I must be entering the details in wrong, and that I have to re-register again tomorrow!  Apparently when the new details come you can’t actually use them till 7 days after you register (as opposed to what it says on the letter which says it will work that day).  Thankfully the accounts seem to be intact as there’s no transactions that shouldn’t be there.  Phew.   Had forgotten the total convenience of remote banking - how did we cope before phone and internet banking?

Summary of the day: Went to work, Had meetings, Got stressed and went to the bank, Rewrote a magazine article, Went to archery (form a bit pants, but nice to be back shooting)

I’m usually a very easy going person, who will help others as much as I can.  Why is it that sometimes people just take the piss and expect you to jump?  I don’t often get very pissed off, but today I am feeling totally used.  People expect you to go out of your way to do things for them, and you have plenty of other things to stress you out to do with your time, yet because you’re such a mug you want to help them and you make time.  I don’t think people realise just how annoying it is, or perhaps they just think I have nothing better to do then to pander to their every need and wait around.  Grr!!

Summary of the day:  Went to work, rewrote a presentation, came home early to get software loaded onto home laptop (need to bring home laptop in for a meeting because work laptop still hasn’t been fixed since nuking itself 20 days ago), fight with Vista (it seems to think it’s acceptable to take 6hrs unzipping a 120MB file), download 7-zip instead (great bit of software and best of all free, unzip now takes all of 2 mins), blitzed house, made wontons for dinner.

So I bought the Gateway MT6722b from the Tesco website last week.  There’s very little on the web about it, so I thought I would post a bit of a review on my blog.  Also to warn people that it’s not necessarily the right specification that they are expecting.

On the whole I am very happy with the Gateway.  It’s not too big, much lighter than my other Toshiba (M70).   It has a nice brushed aluminium plate below the keyboard too (my previous laptops were just painted plastic that wore off after a while).  The specs (at today’s date) on the Tesco’s website are incorrect :(   The differences are namely:

It has 120GB hard drive, not 160GB
It has 1GB of RAM, not 2GB
There is no Bluetooth

Makes it in my opinion pretty much equivalent in price to a lot of the other makes/models of the same price (~£400)  apart from this also has a built in webcam.

I sent Tesco customer services an email to check and they have passed it on to their relevant departments to update the details on the website.

Summary of the day: Sat in lots of meetings (yawn), programmed, had another meeting, went to buy extra last minute birthday presents (happy birthday Hubby!), played Wii, had a quiet night in.

Have spent the last few evenings trying to work out the best thing to use with my music and iPod.  Luckily most of the music was already ripped off the CDs and stored on our shared drive at home (thankfully didn’t have to do it all over again) so I didn’t have to fuss with that.  Previously I just used iTunes, but with a totally new laptop I thought I would try and actually sort out/organise all the different formats of music files we have (some were M4A, some mp3, some wmas, etc).  So now I have the built in Windows Media Player, iTunes and Songbird.  Question is now, which should I use?

A few stats…
# of media players : 3
# of mp3 players : 1 (80GB iPod Video Black)
# of songs : 2446
# of artists : 383
# of albums : 129
# of GB : 6.32

Summary of the day: Went to work, programmed all day long (wow a tutorial that actually teaches you something), played with music files

Hurray I’ve got my new laptop (Gateway MT6722b), and do not have to share hubby’s.  It was fairly cheap (<£400) but has everything that I need.  It came in a moo print box too.  Am just about coping with Vista (it’s looking a little Maclike in places).  Hopefully the work one will be back sometime this week too (fingers crossed).  Will end up having to set up two laptops this week (sorting out toolbars, loading on software, copying across files, playing with settings etc).  Well I suppose there is one useful thing to come out of the laptop catastrophe and that is I don’t now have to purge out My Documents anymore as I can be a bit more selective in what I put back on.

Summary of the day: Went to work, Managed to find my old laptop files on my external HD after all (double hurray), New laptop arrived, Played on laptop ALL evening.

So… putting my iPod on random shuffle these are the first 10 songs.

1. Superheroes - Daft Punk
2. Sister Moonshine - Supertramp
3. Snake Drive - Eric Clapton
4. Michael Caine - Madness
5. I Want You - Savage Garden
6. Tits of the Radio - Scissor Sisters
7. Set the Night to Music - Roberta Flack
8. Red Red Wine - UB40
9. Dead in the Water - David Gray
10. Another One Bites the Dust - Queen

Bit of a strange mix there. There’s quite a lot of oldies (but goodies). You could almost make a sentence/story out of them.  I’m going to have to spend the next weekend I have free putting all my CDs back into iTunes again (after my HD died).

Summary of the day: Woke up 30 mins after my doctor’s appt (d’oh), went to work