I’ve been trying to get my life back in order after moving back to London, and sorting out a few of those things which have gone unsorted for too long, a lot of which comes down to technology. So lets see how I’m getting on shall we:
| Steps forward | Steps backwards. |
|---|---|
| I was dumped into a new assignment (with all the stress which that brings) the day after I arrived back in England | |
| My company laptop, upset at being carried around for the first time in ages, developed a spurious screen/graphics card problem, before I’d taken a back-up of the last 2 years worth of photos, code and other files. | |
| I bought myself a shiney new computer with big hard disk | Despite dell advertising super-cheap desktop PCs, I clicked through the website, added a few optional extras and ended up spending £1200. Bit more than I was intending to spend, but what the hell. |
| I got broadband internet into my home. Having had this in Switzerland I became hooked, and realised it was easily worth the money | I changed my mind about which package to go with on plus.net, and ended up accidentally chosing one which didn’t include php support with the webspace, hence I haven’t been able to re-host harrywood.co.uk as I had intended. |
| Beezly fiddled with my wireless router, and got that to work, so that Sarah was on the internet upstairs too | My ADSL modem can’t plug directly into the router, so untill I purchase a new modem, this will only work by going via my computer (Bad, because my computer then needs to stay switched on) |
| My dad also managed to get hooked up to broadband back at home in Yorkshire | Within hours of having done this, his machine has been crippled by trojan/virus infections, and he has been calling me constantly to ask me what to do about it |
| I got my camera hooked up to my new PC, no problems. And this flickr website certainly looks like a good way to plonk bits of my photo collection online. | In an attempt to avoid putting a dodgy old cracked copy of compupic on my nice new PC, I hunted around for a different peice of photo management software. It seems like a million companies want to give you 30 day evaluation copy of this kind of thing, but what about open source photo managment software? I’m very disappointed. There’s a bajillion different web photo gallery generators, but what about organising, renaming, resizing, cropping, brightening photos offline? A huge home-computing software genre, and the open source community has come up with hardly anything! The free software picasa looked very promising, until I realised that it doesn’t let you save your changes back to file. Bah! update: You can now save changes in Picasa. This was talking about the first few beta versions which stored changes in some internal meta database. |
| I moved some crap from my room into the attic, and I even threw some stuff away | What with all the new computer bits, I still don’t have space for all my junk in my room |
On balance… technology is helping my life to become less organised by the day.
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