Today is the first clear evening since I got my binoculars. Great Googly Moogly on a Stick!! It’s true what they say in the books, you know, Jupiter really is a planet. I can actually tell! If you can see the moon from your window you’ll be able to see it too; it’s just to the moon’s right, by far the brightest point-of-light in that area of sky. I can only see Saturn by standing in the middle of the garden, which isn’t overly conducive to steady viewing, but I can definitely make out a sphere and I think I can faintly see the rings. I may well be fooling myself on that one, though. Mars becomes a lot more orangy, but I can’t make out any particular shape, not without a tripod or something, anyway. The Pleiades are perhaps the second most spectacular change: they suddenly turn from a grey blob into a cluster of very bright stars. Bizarrely it took me a while to actually look at the moon, but the extra detail is stunning, I spent ages just looking at impact craters. Patches of sky where nothing is apparent to the naked eye suddenly have a fair few stars; it should be even more pronounced later. All in all, the binoculars were definitely money well spent.

On the up-side, I just found myself singing a song, and with a little audible evaluation it turned out to be:

Everybody knows, Bodger loves MASHED POTATO!
Somethingy something something every day!
Bodger and Badger, Bodger and Badger, la la la lala, la la la lala!

I haven’t even thought about that program for years! It appears to have a website, including info about the live tour(!).

I’m annoyed. Oh, yes I am. Annoyed annoyed annoyed.

I was at a client’s from 15:30 today; I needed to replace the ADSL modem with an ethernet-ported model, then connect this to an 8-port router that replaced the existing hub. Easy peasy you’d think, but noooo. The network was in use all day, so I did little jobs for a few hours. It finally became available at 18:40, though the whole place was due to close at 19:30 and they like me to be out of the building by 19:15. So I plug in the ADSL modem, connect it to the router, disable the existing ICS setup and reboot.

It doesn’t work. Nothing abnormal here; in fact it’s rare that anything networky does work first time - there are too many variables. But after much playing around with router settings, it still doesn’t work. By this time it’s 19:00. Cue uncharacteristic volleys of expletion. After some digging, it seems that the ADSL modem I so cunningly purchased has a built in router of its own. This was screwing things up somewhat. But even after that, no joy. So in the end I removed it all and replaced the old setup. It didn’t work like it had done before. But then I had to leave. So I spent five hours making things worse, and now will have to go back tomorrow. Great.

Really!

Short post this evening as I’m wrestling with the firewall from hell. You’d think a centrally-controlled firewall package would be great. I’m sure it will be, it’s just that atm it keeps breaking and blocking all connections, then refusing to let you uninstall it locally. You have no idea how quickly that gets old.

1. There is no good time to demonstrate the use of binoculars. Invariably there will be sombody attractive walking past / people looking out of windows / policemen.
2. Meat Loaf’s ‘A Kiss Is A Terrible Thing To Waste’ sounds superb when played very loudly as you drive down the motorway.
3. BT do not supply an ADSL modem with an ethernet port as standard for business installations. Also, you can’t change an existing email address to use their SMTP server as they reject it if the return address lacks a BT domain name.
4. Coronation Street still has the capacity to raise a tear.
5. The Daily Mail, following Ken Livingstone’s lowering of bus fares in the early eighties, published an editorial stating that this was the first step towards a completely communist state.
6. Newton’s theory of Calculus was for hundreds of years very very annoying due to the fact it used an illegal mathematical operation yet never failed to produce the correct answer.
7. Clouds are annoying at night.
8. I don’t understand why the fact that the Earth tilts causes the seasons. So there’s a tilt - the Sun is still 150,000,000 kilometres away, the percentage difference in distance must be tiny.
9. Raymond Blanc is a chef.
10. Catherine from CSI is going to be in trouble before long.

I’ve had two communications from O2 today. Firstly there was a letter telling me that:

Despite previous reminders you have chosen to ignore our attempts to resolve this seriously overdue debt.

Please be advised that the relevant paperwork is now being prepared for the issue of a County Court Summons [...]

You have five days from the date of this letter to avoid this action.

This didn’t particularly worry me now that Egg are on my side, but further down the letter it said:

Information regarding the non-payment has been passed to a credit reference agency.

I heard the Jeremy Vine financial expert talking about this the other day, and he was saying how this kind of problem can disrupt any kind of credit for years. Given that chances are I’ll be wanting a mortgage within a few years, I was a bit worried by this. I was about to write them a letter back when an email turned up:

After much deliberation O2 Online have decided to close the account number 1000313136 registered in your name.

Regrettably it is not cost effective for us to pursue the whereabouts of the original order or the identity of the user that has made a large number of calls on this account.

Bearing this information in mind, I have contacted the relevant department to ensure that the necessary refunds are applied to both clear the account and refund the handset. This should occur within the next 28-days and I do hope this meets with your approval.

I offer my apologies for any inconvenience this matter may have caused you, although do hope that you can understand our position.

Woohoo!! I quickly sent a copy of this to the bill-collecting department. Phew! Though I certainly won’t be using them again, it’s good that they came around in the end. And they were at least polite I’m so glad I don’t have to worry about that any more! On a related note, I yesterday got a PAC code from Singlepoint and gave it to Orange; hopefully my number will be transferred soon and I won’t have to worry about mobile phones for at least a good few months!

As regards the time of the weekend I didn’t spend half-asleep, Kate and I saw The Missing at the cinema, as well as catching a film on tv that I’d never heard of: Don’t Throw Momma From The Train. Both were very entertaining.

I spent too much money on Saturday. I’ve been looking at getting a telescope, but every advice page anywhere says that binoculars are the way to go. For the amateur, they’re much easier to use and carry around. If you’re still interested after that then you should start looking at telescopes. Binoculars are defined in two ways: their length (focal length) and the size of the lenses (the aperture). Apparently 7 (the aperture) x 50 (the focal length) or 10×50 are the best for astronomical purposes. So while in York we had a look in the local camera shop. They had a pair of 7×50 in the window, but for £180. I think not. I wasn’t desperate to get any, so thought I’d see what kind of prices they are on the Internet. Later on, however, we walked past Jessops, so popped in. They had three 10×50s. One by Jessops for £40, a Pentax for £60 and a Minolta for £80. The assistant said that he’d show me all three, but that I’d narrow it down to two very quickly. He was correct. He let me go wandering up the street with them all, providing I left Kate behind as a deposit. The Jessops ones weren’t that great, and as the assistant put them back in to the box he described them as ‘nasty’. The Pentax and the Minolta were closer, but I finally went with the latter as they felt more robust, as well as being totally waterproof. When he rang them up at the till, however, they were slightly different from the model in the catalogue and came to £100. I went for them anyway. These are the pair I bought. I’m not even going to think about how $89.99 translates into pounds, especially with the current exchange rate! Thankfully the cheapest I can find them on UK sites is £90, and I imagine postage would bump that up. I have yet to try them out with stars, but shall have a go later tonight, providing it’s clear.

Checking my bank account today took the worry away from the above purchase, however, as Egg have apparenly agreed with me and refunded me my £200 from the O2 dispute! So O2 and I are now even, though they’ll probably be chasing me before long. I got my monthly online bill from them over the weekend, incidentally. Last month: £275.05, this month: £274.24. Excluding the stupidity of this high a bill for a phone I’ve never owned, how on Earth does it go down 81p?! Some kind of reverse interest charges, maybe?

Fear not, your worries are over, I have returned safely. Did you have a fun weekend? I did.

As per my now four-year-old tradition, I stayed up all night to watch the Oscars. Twas a most entertaining night! Last year’s ceremony was kinda spoilt by people raving about the war…Though not that much was really said (with one attention-seeking exception), every time somebody went onstage you worried they’d go off on one. Thankfully this year was pretty much a politics-free zone, which made it a much more relaxed evening.

Billy Crystal is a born Oscar host - few people would be able to get away with some of the cracks he came out with! I was happy to see LOTR:ROTK win 11 oscars from 11 nominations. For me, ROTK was an extraordinary achievement…especially when you think how amazingly easy it would have been to mess up. It has also pretty much beaten Titanic, which won 12 awards but was nominated for 14. The only disappointment of the evening was Sean Penn winning best actor over Bill Murray. It was only disappointing in that BM would have undoubtedly been amusing; I haven’t actually seen either Mystic River or Lost in Translation. Speaking of LiN, I felt sorry for Sofia Coppola. She’s the first American woman to be nominated for Best Director and all any of the interviewers did was ask about her father (Francis Ford Coppola - director of The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, Dracula etc.) She won for Best Original Screenplay, though. All in all, an excellent time was had by me, though I did pay for it all day Monday