End-of-Year-Roundup

18:43.26 - Saturday 31st December 2005   (Link to This Entry)

Phew! What a year it's been! I'm not going to do multiple posts this time since I can't be bothered - instead I shall just rip off someone else's idea and do it all in one. Huzzah!

Christmas Capers
We're finally getting over the seasonal madness that comes with having seven people clustered 'round yon miniscule dining table. Everyone knew each other so there was no reason not to bunch up, and much fun was had by all. Mother Dearest showed a hithertoundiscovered flair for Monopoly (or maybe it was beginners luck?) wiping the board with M and myself, and while nobody got anything hugely expensive this year, hardly anybody got socks.

Invoice Cockup
I just found that I've been billing a customer of mine twice what I should have been... and he's been paying. Six months ago I agreed to cut his monthly fee in half because the site in question honestly didn't need that much more doing to it, but for some reason I never actually got round to changing the amount on his bill (an Excel file I keep pre-written).

I sent him an apologetic email and suggested not invoicing him for the next six months to make up for it. Hopefully everything will be fine, but I feel a bit of a plonker for not changing the figure when I should have.

Seasonal Rant
In every car I have ever driven, I have never once seen heated wiper jets. Considering that these wee nozzles on your car bonnet are completely exposed to the elements, it boggles the mind that they should be expected not to clog up after ejaculating unheated water in sub-zero temperatures. Would it be so hard to have a heating coil along the water path to keep the liquid a couple of degrees above freezing?

Microsoft Windows WMF Vuln.
Oh, this is a goodie. Do just about anything with a web image in Windows and you get rooted? How lovely! View an image thumbnail? Get infected! View the image? Infected! Open it in MS Paint? Infected! This one's very, very bad indeed. [Link]

Laptops with Compact Flash?
I'm in the market for a new laptop after my Inspiron decided to choke on the smaller of it's harddrives. Browsing the shelves at PCWorld I noticed that more and more of them are coming equipped with card readers - SD, MMC, XD... but not Compact Flash. Typically, my camera uses CF (as all the best cameras do) for storage. It will also take XD but let's not go there. So where are the laptops with Compact Flash slots? Nowhere, that's where!

The Gateway 400L has one, but it's huge, US-Only and, well, Gateway. The Samsung Q30 has one but it's only 1.1Ghz and it's £1200+. I'm seriously considering the Philips X50 because it's so tiiiny, but again - no Compact Flash. It does have a PCMCIA slot (something the similarly-sized 12in Apple Powerbook lacked - and don't mention the price) so I could use an adapter.

President of the Internet
I've lost interest in this whole President of the Internet thing now, after reaching 7th place at one point. I just can't be bothered to do anything more with it at this moment in time. Perhaps one day I'll try again, but... meh.