Technological Order and Chaos

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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