hehehehe – we are being cheeky and asking for a four star hotel for 40 quid a night in chicago now 🙂

Woohoo – the holiday is on! We get a decent holiday flight to Chicago, and by using priceline we saved 118 pounds on two tickets so we got quite a bargain. The funny thing is that the site reckoned we would not get the tickets when i put the original price in. It recommended putting in a price that was only 10 pounds cheaper than the list price! I ignored the advice but upped the offer by 10pounds and it was accepted. AND it is a direct flight (When I checked the internet there were three cheapish flights, two direct and one with a change, so I just hoped that we got the direct flight.) Thats twice Priceline has come up trumps! Cracking!

Kristen’s car has been officially been declared a writeoff and they are giving us 1600 quid for it 🙁 However we have sourced a Fiesta for 1000 so we end up better off AND we get 30quid back from the insurance as the fiesta is cheaper to insure! I had delayed putting the car pictures online due to the number plate and things, but it doesnt matter now!
Oh – and the Audi that Kristen drove into is also a writeoff – oops!

Xp seems to be running really well on the old machine – I must say that I am impressed with the speed of it so far…..mind you, this is a fresh installation with no bloat in Windows at the moment. It’s been activated with MS and I just need to download the service pack for it now.

Why does XP take so long to install????? (Don’t answer that!) I mucked up my mandrake installation so thought i’d repartition the disk and put xp on it. I have a 120 day eval from MS so I’ll see how good it is at home with all my hardware and stuff. It’s not on the main pc as I value that just a little bit! That is running 98 at the moment but needs to be updated. Norton Anti-Virus uses memory and then it complains that my drive C is full, with 1.5GB of disk space on it. A quick reboot later and its all hunky dory again…but its a pain to do that every other day.

I never really understood the difference between passive and active mode on ftp. I do now!

Fired up the Linux box this evening, and for the first time the update routine worked and downloaded all the patches (of which there were several) AND I didn’t need to reboot 🙂
Update I actually did this last night as I was again posting to the wrong blog – oops!

The first ever smiley, but according to discussions on the register, other people have claimed to use it in punch cards before this…so it may not be 🙂

Neat Boulderdash game.

Some people are concerned about the fact that Trillian now charges for instant messaging facilites and reckon this could be illegal as its charging for access to closed networks. Although i’m not a lawyer, I don’t think it matters if its free or not…if you are accessing someones network without their consent, then thats hacking and illegal regardless of the cost you are paying….The other thing is that the paid version of Trillian does not have any difference in the chat side of things to the free version. The paid version only includes things such as the RSS syndication and stock information etc which has nothing to do with the chat side of things…so why the fuss?