I rang Dorridge surgery for an appointment at 11:00 this morning (I’m pregnant), then promply saw the doctor and was all done by 12:00! Very impressive. The Government implemented a new system last year in which you can only make appointments within the next two days, and I admit I was a little skeptical. However I haven’t had a problem making an appointment since, which is very cool
After that I nipped over the road to the bank. I had a dollar cheque to pay in and it ended up costing

The people have spoken, and apparently if they were surrounded by cannibal monkeys and had only moments to live, the confectionary of choice would be chocolate. Swiftly followed by fudge and then sweets. Mints and Turkish Delight didn’t get a look in. The new poll question is regarding music downloads - where do you get yours?

While we’re talking chocolate, I’m looking forward to the new Charlie and the Chocolate Factory film. I found the trailer entertaining, although I know there are those who disagree I have fond memories of the book - in fact I have fond memories of all Roald Dahl books - and as long as the film doesn’t get too silly it should be great.

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned something that had made me rather happy, but I couldn’t talk about. Well, now I can.

Back in February I bought a murder mystery game from Mysteries on the Net and signed up for regular newsletters. In mid-March the author contacted everybody on the mailing list, saying he was looking for people to write (non-murder) mysteries for the companion site - Kids’ Mysteries. So I did, and after a couple of drafts it was accepted. As of today The Perplexing Case of the Pilfered Pooch is published and available for download. This is a great feeling; I must do this more often.

The wongaWebcam is up and running. There’s an image on the blogroll too. Currently it’s been hijacked by Sully, who’s using it to show off his lava lamp. Honestly, that monster. Image updated every two minutes, during my waking hours.

Don’t be offended if I haven’t replied to any emails you’ve sent in the last 24 hours. Our email server wasn’t booting up this morning, and I haven’t managed to fix it yet. [deletes rather-old-person-like rant]. So yes, I’m not being rude, really. I’ve got to get it up and running again by tomorrow given that it runs Mum and Dad’s office too.

Just finished watching the royal wedding. It was quite pleasant viewing, actually. As ever I got a bit fed up with the nonsensical theology, but it was interesting to see the royal family all in one place. I particularly liked it when they all piled into buses to be driven up the hill. I’ve always felt sorry for Camilla as she’s been absolutely hounded by the media for no apparent reason. There are continual jokes about how ugly she is, which seems to me childish and bizarre. Not that it matters, but I don’t even find her particularly unattractive. Maybe it’s just in comparison to Diana, but if she’s the benchmark we’re all in trouble. Anyway, I think it’s great that they went ahead. I’ve heard arguments about whether he should have married Diana originally / the role of marriage / religious issues, but how can it be a bad thing for two people to be happy, when it doesn’t harm anybody else?

Nipped into Solihull this morning and, entirely on a whim, grabbed myself a webcam. I used to have a tiny little digital camera that doubled as a webcam (in fact it singled as a webcam given that it failed to save pictures half the time) but the quality wasn’t exactly terribly good and it kept falling off the monitor. This should do the job much more effectively, and it can link into Messenger etc. I’m not particularly into video-chatting, but I’m mulling over a cunning plan for it atm…

I’d recommend Cowboy Frank for webcam reviews (surprisingly difficult to find elsewhere).

We had snow earlier (update: and again this evening). Snow. We’ve set up a heater in the office due to the aforementioned broken boiler, which now won’t be fixed until Tuesday. I revised all day in front of the fire, which was cosy although did open me up to ear-nibbling whenever our house-guest woke up. The dog, obviously, what were you thinking?

I bet Prince Charles wishes he’d chosen a different date for the wedding. First there was the obvious prostrate pontiff hiccup, then for whatever reason it was decided that they should “acknowledge and bewail [their] manifold sins and wickedness” during the wedding blessing. What century is it, again? Anyway, at the Pope’s funeral today the future king was presented with a hand to shake, and upon taking it and looking up he discovered it belonged to Robert Mugabe. Tiny little faux pas, there. Mr Mugabe shouldn’t even have been there, incidentally, as he’s banned from travelling within the EU. Good to see that being enforced. Still, hopefully tomorrow’s ceremony will go without a hitch.

Anybody have any exciting plans for the weekend? I feel like visiting somewhere interesting, but I don’t know where as yet…any ideas?

If you visited the blog in the last half hour or so you’ll have seen the results of why you shouldn’t install wordpress plugins without understanding fully what they do. Ahem. All back to normal now, I hope
Dancing was fun this evening, although exhausting! We learned a turn in the quickstep, followed by a spinny-swappy-handy-move in the jive, then practiced the cha-cha-cha. They’re all reasonably fast dances and I was pretty tired by the end! The energy of youth is apparently an exaggeration…either that or I’m getting old.

Our boiler died yesterday afternoon, and the Man Who Fixes Boilers informs us that an engineer needs to be sent out. They may come tomorrow, or it may be Monday. Thankfully we have the immersion heater for hot water, but there’ll be no heating until it’s working again. According to weather reports there’s a strange type of cold front moving in - the one originally discovered by Frasier Bolokoff - so this weekend may be entertaining.

Forgot to blog this yesterday…Was checking my stats to see how people are getting to the site, and discovered this:

Which links to a not-terribly-polite post about the UK Independence Party I’m more intrigued as to why somebody was searching for it in the first place, mind…

MSN 7 Final was released sometime last night. It’s quite an improvement over the last beta, actually. You can now, finally, set it to log you in automatically as ‘away’ or ‘appear offline’. This is great for me as I always forget to log in manually - too many years of ICQ are embedded into my psyche Also there’s now a specific field to add a ‘personal message’ so that people don’t need to change their username continually. And there’s a new emoticon - a goat:

Question: Why is the new emoticon a goat?
Nicole: We had a charity auction inside of Microsoft and we auctioned off the design of the new emoticon. The team that won selected a goat, I am not sure why.

There are a couple of other new features that let you link into Media Player, but not Winamp / iTunes as far as I can tell. You can also, thankfully, turn off the tabs. There was something about tabbed messaging too, but I can’t actually see any sign of that…As ever, there are Messenger Plus plugins that’ll kill the adverts.

Update: Hidden away in the settings is also ‘Start Video Conversation’, which as far as I know makes MSN the first IM to implement actual video calls. It’s only available in certain markets, apparently, so I don’t know whether it works in the UK. I’d test it if I had a webcam

My brain’s exploding with stuff. Oodles of it. Bucketfuls of oddities, confuddlements and bizzaros. Somebody crocheted a hyperbolic shape. Somebody else thinks black holes don’t exist. The election campaign is officially underway and there’ve already been two defections. Parliament will be dissolved at the end of the week, after which nobody can legally call themselves an ‘MP’. You’ve got to feel sorry for the parliamentary bloggers with MP in their domain name. Also, I just read

So here’s a little bloggy experiment. I’m working on a story and could really do with some help. Here’s the beginning:

Via the internet, a young man comes into contact with a woman who seems to be quite extraordinary. There aren’t many people he finds so delightful, and he doesn’t want to pass this up, despite any difficulties that may be around the corner. There’s a time constraint, though, and he’d really like to suggest meeting up to go to the theatre or something, his treat. However, he’s very, very concerned that:

• He’ll seem like a scary stalker person
• It’s far too soon
• He’ll scare her away

It’d be a tricky situation, wouldn’t it? How could he ask somebody to be that trusting? How would you continue the story? If you have any ideas it’d be wonderful if you would email me…

There was an interesting incident at badminton this evening. Having lost a game for the first time in many, many weeks, Simon packed up his things and stormed out of the room. We all looked at each other, somewhat shocked. We felt bad. Had our glee been too extreme? Had we taunted excessively? Thirty seconds later, he jumped through the doors and leapt into our midst. We were well and truly fooled. Nicely done

I just fired up iTunes looking for ‘Refugees’ by The Tears, and came across ‘Do you Realize’ by The Flaming Lips. Wow. It was a pleasant enough song on the radio, but over stereo speakers it’s really something! I’ve just bought their entire album