I tried to register a freeserve account earlier and got this:

Well, you can’t accuse them of discrimination! It turned out to be an Opera thing - Avant worked fine. Speaking of Opera, I tried the 7.5 beta yesterday. Ugh! It looked awful. To be fair, my Opera is fairly heavily customized, and I did install 7.5 afresh rather than upgrading, but nevertheless it wasn’t nice. It had more than a touch of the Mozilla look about it, which is a mistake imho. I’ll be interested to see what 7.5 final looks like.

I ripped some CDs to MP3 today and my Yamaha was grabbing data at 19x! I’ve never even approached this speed before…The drive only used to do about 9x. The only real difference is the new version of EAC, but I can’t believe it’s entirely down to that.

As a matter of interest, I discovered last week that you can get a 10-computer corporate license of the f-prot virus scanner for €40.72. That’s £27! Each additional license costs an extra €3.26. You can get a personal license for all non-commercial computers in a household for €23.62. While f-prot doesn’t do as much, it protects you against viruses perfectly well and if you don’t mind a bit of manual configuration it certainly compares favourably to certain other brands! Yes, you read that right, NAV is available online for £44.99 a copy. I don’t quite see why it costs more direct from them than from a shop…Middle-men don’t normally sell things at a loss I still recommend NAV to clients due to the emphasis on user-friendliness, but I’ll certainly be bearing f-prot in mind for people whose computers I look after.

My car is booked into the garage tomorrow. If I get it to them between 0800 and 0900 they’ll take a look at it during the day. The shuddering is pretty bad now, so I’ll be interested to know what’s causing it and whether it’s an easy fix. Hopefully it won’t be in for long; I feel bizarrely trapped without my car, which is odd considering how much I despise driving