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?

The BBC are reporting about a guy who made a film where he asked his girlfriend to marry him, and then managed to get it shown at his local cinema just before the main feature…..How romantic is that?

Looks like MoveableType version 2.5 is out later this month. I will probably hold off until it’s released and then move this blog onto this engine. I really like the facilities that are being programmed for this excellent piece of software. It should also give me the ability to play with some php programming too.

There seems to be a growing backlash against Anti-Spam services out on the internet, the most recent that I’ve seen (from Blogger) is the Developer Dispatch. Personally I think the anti-spam filters are great but only if you get the option to unquarantine incorrectly blocked email, or even know that the isp is running a spam checker for you. I have run foul of this on my current hosting provider (who also handles my incoming email) in that it blocks all email from yahoogroups as it considers it all spam, and also uses spamcop. The YahooGroups is obviously a draconian overkill process, but what annoyed me is that there is no text to inform their customers that this happens. I only discovered it when emails I send out to a group were not being received by my own account and checking on the Yahoo page I discovered that the emails had been bounced back by the isp…..they were not interested in removing this block.
Another isp that I also use for another domain uses various blacklists, and several times I’ve found myself not being able to send emails to this account as either Pipex or demon have been blacklisted – this is one big blacklisting, stopping almost the two biggest isps in britain from sending email!

Personally, I think the best solution is to run your own spamkiller in house that can decide what is spam or not. I run a filtering option on my incoming email via my own mail server and I reckon I get about one spam a week making it past the filters…..Probably about twenty or thirty a day are being blocked by the filter options.
Remember, you can see my latest anti-spam decoder on my website which allows you to get my email address but stops bots picking it up and spamming me.

At Kristen’s party last night I was playing around with the camera and took a couple of macro photo’s that can be seen either side of this post. Click on the pictures to see the bigger fullsize pic. Either of these photo’s may be used as a background/theme in a webpage on this site in the near future….

Researchers reckon they have found the first ever smiley 🙂 that was posted almost 20 years ago. They will be 20 years old on the 19th September if that is the case 🙂

Fantastic news – I don’t have to go around nekkid anymore – I’ve found my wedding ring!!!!!!!
I was doing the washing up and as I went to move some cups on the draining board I saw the ring. It was such a relief to be able to put it back on again. It’s been quite depressing the past couple of days thinking that I had lost it for good. It is amazing just how many times my fingers have gone to where the ring was and tried to move it – a subconsious twitch that I’ve had! Now I can twitch all I like 🙂

hooray – my website is looking back to normal again on my pc. I used WinOptimizer to clear Internet Explorer’s cache but that didn’t seem to do any good, so I then went into control panel/add/remove components and went to remove ie6sp1 (which would have reverted me back to ie5!!!!). However I chose the option to repair, and it seems to have done so. AND i’m still running sp1. Phew!