Is there anything I should have done in 2005 that I haven’t? Any cultural jokes that need to be made? I always think of them too late…

If you’re in need of something to do this evening, I recommend the 2005 round-up quizzes from www.freequizzes.co.uk. They’re not actually free, despite the name, but I’ve been using them all year for various occasions and they’re always pretty good. The occasional question needs rephrasing so it sounds ok when read out loud, but the topics are interesting and they’re of just the right difficulty, I think. The quizzes are immediately download-able, too.

To put it bluntly, my 2004 was shit. 12 months ago I was very glad to see the back of it. Was 2005 any better? This feels terribly indulgent, but I like going back over the last twelve months as there are always things I’d forgotten about. So, in no particular order…

Highlights

Live 8 - spectacular in every respect. I have many fond memories of that day, and it was one hell of an experience. Overall, the Make Poverty History campaign achieved a great deal. It may not have managed every goal to the levels they’d hoped for, but the sheer force of will changed the political landscape of the year. The 14 poorest countries’ debt was cancelled, and millions are better off as a result.

Discovering blogging - despite having written a blog for more than a year, I didn’t really discover blogging as a phenomenon until the first months of 2005. I can’t believe I was so far behind the times on this one! I’ve made some great blogging chums, found out how to use feeds properly, discovered podcasts and generally learnt a lot.

Discovering Flickr - I’m definitely addicted to flickr! I love posting my photos and reading what people think of them. It’s also one of the few online communities where the trolls are almost unnoticeable.

Completing NaNoWriMo - it may not be very good, but it’s a 50,000 word novel written entirely by me. The biggest discovery was that it wasn’t too hard. Ignoring the calibre of the content, physically writing the thing was easier than I’d expected.

Megan - my sister’s puppy is insane, but eminently lovable.

Gliding / flying a plane - I took part in both of these as part of the Spice activity group, and they were great! When I’m rich, I’ll definitely be learning to fly
Dancing - Lynsey and I started learning ballroom and latin dancing on the 4th of Jan, and have been going every week since. The feeling of satisfaction you get when you manage something tricky is great! Many thanks to Lynsey for putting up with me treading on her for all these months…

Katie Melua in concert - It was entirely down to Ed that I attended this, and I had a great evening.

Wandering around London in the sunshine - Nod and I headed down to London for a comics convention, then met up with Ed and Simon and walked around London embankment before coming across an anti-war march in Trafalgar Square. I just remember it as being very pleasant. The day was definitely memorable, for a number of reasons.

Paris - I went to Paris for a weekend for Dad’s 50th birthday. I’d never been before, and it was fascinating to walk around. Unfortunately I lost half of my photos due to a faulty memory card.

Learning the guitar - I picked up a guitar ’starter pack’ on a whim in January, and have enjoyed it a lot. I started having proper lessons in June-ish. I think moving to an electric guitar will help with the problems I’ve had with some chords.

Getting help for my various social problems - the life coaching has helped a fair bit, and hopefully I’ll continue to improve. I’m definitely far more confident and less prone to worrying than I was a year ago.

Moving house - Moving to my lovely flat in Stratford is undoubtedly the largest change of the year! I’m scared about keeping myself above water financially, as well as being lonely, but it’s still very exciting!

Lowlights

Join Me - Although I still love the idea of Join Me, the voice of the online community was increasingly one devoted to getting drunk and being snide. I slowly became disillusioned and drifted away. I started forgetting the Friday ROAKs, too. I know that the forums were eventually moved to a new location and the more vocal members banned, but it was too late for me by then. I’m sad that I don’t feel as enthusiastic as I once did, as it was a great thing.

Spice - The activity group I signed up for in the summer. Unfortunately I convinced myself that everybody else at the gliding and flying meetings had hated me, never plucked up the courage to take part in anything else and let my membership lapse. I think I need to go with somebody else so I don’t feel quite so out-of-place.

Exam results - My A-levels didn’t go quite as planned. In hindsight, trying to complete the Maths a-level in a year was too optimistic. Also, I ran out of motiviation in late spring, and struggled to keep working. Still, the C in physics was good.

Funerals - A friend of my age from school died from cancer in February, and a month or so later a teacher from my old magic club died in a fall while mountain walking. Both funerals were very sad.

Friends moving away - many friends finished university and scattered across the country.

Conclusion

Holy crap, this was a busy year! Overall, it was definitely not shit 2006 should be mighty different, hope it’s a good one!

Fun thing I found out today that won’t mean a thing to non-UK readers: this year’s leap-second will be added to the end of tomorrow, which means that the pips on BBC radio will be extended by a whole extra pip! There are already people who complain about the pips being delayed on digital radio due to the second or two needed for compression. This’ll really spoil their new year.

I was feeling kinda down this evening, but a shot of Scrubs cheered me right up.

For more than a year I’ve been coming across a problem with Windows XP, USB drives and mapped network drives. Each computer here has four mapped network drives, which are assigned the letters F:, G:, H: and I:. When I plug in a USB key Windows tries to assign F:, fails and gives up. Disconnecting the network drive and reinserting the key (or going into device manager and hitting ‘populate’) was the only way to fix it, and this was tiresome. However, it’s one of those problems that you forget about as soon as you’ve solved it.

I finally remembered to look up a solution today, and there isn’t one. The official Microsoft response says that you should use as high letters as possible for mapped network drives. I’ve moved them to W: onwards, and the USB key can now happily use F:.

The problem apparently occurs with all types of removable media, so hopefully somebody will find this useful.

Just watched The Family Man on C4. I was in exactly the right mood, and enjoyed it muchly. It’s only half 10 now, which is weird. I’m used to finishing watching films and it being time for bed. I watched The American President until early in the morning a couple of days ago, despite having seen it at least three times before. I’m just a sucker for anything by Aaron Sorkin. Speaking of whom, I received West Wing Series 6 as a christmas present, and it’s sitting in its wrapping in the lounge, desperate to be opened. I’m planning to limit myself to one episode per week so it lasts longer

If I knew why, I’d fix it. I’ve updated the relevant plugin, and hopefully it’s a problem with feedburner, now…I’ll give it a few hours and see whether it solves itself.

Update: It appears to be a problem with the feedburner plugin and an apparent bug in the Wordpress redirects. I think it’s fixed now. Rather than change settings that would break links, I’ve disabled the plugin entirely and used the instructions from here to get it working again, although it’ll need patching up once a proper fix is announced.

Well, that went fairly smoothly. Other than a slow FTP program, I haven’t come across any major issues. There was one display problem which was easily solved. Woo! Please let me know if you notice any problems. It’s certainly swish behind the scenes.

Going to try to upgrade to WP 2.0. Things may break, and I may use the default theme while fixing plugin problems.

My sister’s wireless network has been playing up for a few weeks, and looking at it today I found out why. She has a BT ADSL modem, into which is plugged a Linksys router¹. I originally helped her set it up over the phone, and after finding that the BT modem IP was 192.168.0.1, told her to configure the Linksys as 192.168.0.2. She had all sorts of problems with random disconnects, and it turns out that the BT modem demands the use of 192.168.0.2 as well. Weird. Setting a higher IP for the Linksys has, I hope, solved the problems.

1. odd setup I know - she was originally on cable so just needed the Linksys, but then moved to an ADSL-only area [↩]

Sorry for the lack of blogging. I’ve decided to stay with my parents for the week, as I’m here dog-sitting for a couple of days anyway, and the rest of the week I’d only get lonely in Stratford and come back. I don’t think this is a fun week to be on your own. I’m only checking my emails a few times per day, which is quite a change from normal! I did manage to upload a fair few christmassy photos yesterday, with the help of Picasa. Since Jo’s had so little trouble, I might brave a Wordpress upgrade tomorrow without all of my normal programs.

I went and checked on the flat earlier today, and discovered I’d left a window open. Dumbass. It was out onto the walkway at the back of the building so in theory wasn’t publicly accessible. Still, there are only four windows in the flat, so it was a pretty stupid thing to do! It was very cold in there, too. Still, no harm done. Thankfully everything else was fine. I picked up a couple of plectrums, which work far better than the Pointy Piece of Plastic I ripped from some packaging, as well as a couple of other bits and pieces I’ll need to last until the weekend.

I’m currently a few chapters into Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which was a present. I don’t know whether it’s the content, the writing style, or a mixture of both, but I’m finding it absolutely fascinating. I guess I was also looking for an excuse to ditch Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I’d been struggling with. Maybe it gets better, but the endlessly florid dialogue of turn of the century academics drove me to distraction! Maybe I’ll come back to that at some point. Although my to-read pile now contains a couple of Richard Dawkins books, as well as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, so it may be quite a long wait.

I was in Comet this morning, and all over the floor were large arrows, underneath which was:

I-Pod’s ??

I frame no hypothesis.

There’s apparently heavy snowfall expected tonight…Wonder how much we’ll see here.

Btw, Wordpress 2.0 is out. Looks very interesting - I’ll most likely have a play with it tomorrow. Not sure whether I’ll be able to resist the temptation up upgrade, mind…The site may break for a while!

Hope everybody had a fun couple of days. Yesterday was crazy here. Three year olds are so very, very noisy. Granted they have redeeming features, but the relief when it quietens down is quite remarkable! Megan was her normal crazy self, and early on in the day decided it was her job to guard the turkey. And that she did. Although not managing to get any of it, she did manage to grab a turkey bone in a rare unguarded moment in the late afternoon, which was fun to wrestle away from her.

I managed to escape and watch Doctor Who in the evening. I thought it was great - I definitely approve of the new Doctor! How you can have a dramatic sword fight while wearing pyjamas and still come out of it looking cool, I have no idea. The great acting and dialogue mean I’ll overlook the massive anti-war political comment built into the plot…To be fair, it was a theme of the series too, so wasn’t unexpected. The preview of the upcoming series made it look very exciting - the brief glimpse of K-9 was fun!

I’ve spent much of today and yesterday playing my main present, a Yamaha electric guitar. It’s great I’ve been learning for nearly a year and although I’m not good enough to play in front of anybody else, I can make a passable attempt at more simple Oasis songs. I have discovered that electric guitar is far, far easier than acoustic. The strings are far easier to push down, and I can now play barre chords at roughly the same speed as standard ones - I need to reposition my hand far less than before. Bending the strings is much easier, too. My fingers hurt like hell this evening, though
I’ll head back to the flat tomorrow and decide on any plans for the rest of the week.

The presents have been dropped off at the appropriate houses, last-minute shopping is complete, the table’s laid, I finally found a copy of the QI interactive game and I’m back with Mum and Dad for the weekend. I’m staying here until boxing day. Tomorrow there’ll be thirteen of us crammed into the house, including two three year-olds. And, of course, there’s Megan. I’m looking forward to seeing her reaction to wrapping paper
I still think this is the best day of the year. There’s a certain atmosphere that only seems to manifest itself on the 24th december, I think, and everybody seems to be just that little bit more pleasant.

I’m off to watch Miracle on 34th Street (1947 edition) and scoff chocolate
Merry christmas!

While hunting around for the remarkably elusive QI interactive DVD I spotted that HMV have the Firefly DVD box set at £17.99. Sure it’ll probably be cheaper by Monday, but it’d make a great last minute christmas present!

I so like walking around Stratford at christmas - it’s all so pretty and festive.