Trillian Pro went through a proper test on the office lan today – the same pc that works on the home network will not connect through the office firewall which stinks….This makes is unusable for me, so its back to the plain free version on the one at home. Shame as I was really looking forward to using it.

Did my tax return on the internet yesterday. It was not as easy as last year and I’m not convinced the end total was correct, still I’ll see what they have to say. I eventually got the new passwords to the system – two arrived on the same day, two weeks after I originally requested a password (the first and second one never turned up but they sent two different ones on the third request!). It is harder to do your tax return on the net when they dont give you any accompanying documentation which you got with the paper version. They only give you a month to download a pdf (or text) version of your completed form but i guess that is long enough. I am impressed at how the pdf is generated – its a smart use of technology. (just a shame that the backend office processes of getting the forms and documentation to me in the first place is flawed bigtime.)
Well i’m back off to bed to try and recover before work – goodnight.

A man in Sweden has locked himself in a cage as his son is being locked up without trial or normal human rights. He is hoping to raise awareness of his sons plight and get his government to do something about it.

I really think that the makers of Trillian should really let people try the pro version out for free for a trial period. There are significant changes with the addition of plugins and a totally new interface that the product is quite disimilar to the standard Trillian package and I would not really want to fork out for a licence for software that may not work and indeed a sneak look at Trillian Pro shows that the voidstar method of xml’ing my webpage (and Neil’s) will not work with their RSS aggregator which is a bit disappointing as that was my major reason for wanting to get it. It insists that Yahoo has 35 emails waiting for me when I have none. The Winamp plugin which popups to tell you what mp3 you are playing is neat – although I would have thought its obvious when you hear it through the speakers! pop3 Mail checker doesn’t seem to work either 🙁
Actually I’ve just shutdown and relaunched trillian and it is checking my web site properly now…still not working well on mail, but the yahoo mailcount is now correct! (and yes I will be taking the pro version off)

What a day!
First the car, I then go downstairs and find Basil’s decided to use Frankie’s bed as a litter box (again!) AND I then find out I’m not wearing my wedding ring any longer……eeek!

What a nice birthday present my wife has given herself! She’s run in the back of someone else’s car, so I guess her b’day present will be a new bonnet and air-bag….it will be a bit hard to wrap though.
Fortunately she’s ok and we’d just got her car insurance renewed two weeks ago AND went protected no claims so it shouldn’t hit us next year (I hope!). Daft thing is that when I rang up the breakdown cover to get the car back home the national grid reference was no use to them (got from Multimap) . You would have thought that an accurate location reference such as that would be really useful!

Some sick $%£^£$ has created a virus purporting to be about Sept11. Called 11september.exe it promises photos of Osama Bin laden and the US Secretary of State in “friendly” dialogue! DON’T open it and make sure you av software is uptodate!

Another sp1 problem?????? Any link clicked from this webpage causes ie to close and offer to send a bug report to Microsoft. The funny thing is that the page has been written using Word by the looks of it so it should work. Anyone else get this?
Update The problem also occurs on ie6 without the service pack!

Now that I’ve installed ie6 service pack1, The Bat client comes up with “Access violation at address 004cf08c in module ‘thebat.exe’. Read of address 02e4fffe” whenever I move my mouse onto the task bar….most annoying.
On a slightly related note, I got to use XPPro yesterday – I like the interface…I didn’t previously, but there are a few nifty tricks like the hiding of unused desktop icons and the hiding of taskbar icons that I like (the first I reckon you could write a dos batch file to fix!)

Screenshot of IE6service pack1 download dialog box. Note the virus warning!