Hurrah...I get to go home at lunchtime! Last night I 'accidentally' made what sounds like a duff Boards of Canada pastiche (mp3 - sorry lo-fi viewers) which I don't know what to do with. Any suggestions? Is it time for Neighbours yet?

Haven't been here for a while, have I? Oh well.

L is away this weekend so I am busy on the computer when I should be doing proper things like the washing up and plumbing the new washing machine. Am listening to The Beach Boys Fun Fun Fun. I never liked the idea of the Beach Boys' surf-y stuff, having done it the wrong way round and listened to Pet Sounds first. Although Fun Fun Fun is clearly an excellent song. This has inspired me in a roundabout way to find as many VST plugins as I can, so I finally got Native Instruments' Absynth which has some lovely sounds - now I've got to dig around for some more presets cos I can't be bothered to make my own.

At school it all went horribly wrong when Corporate Bigwigs pulled the plug on key software development after 3 years. Doh. This bit of software was supposed to Save The World or something, so we weren't allowed to do any short-term development because it would all be taken care of by SaveTheWorld. So now we've got neither. Doh (slight return).

Went on the No War march last weekend, it was all very jolly, especially the punks singing Heal The World (badly). Mr Tony Blair had his fingers in his ears.

Must go away and do things, namely a) washing up, b) sort washing machine out, and c) Romarin website.

Phew...I never thought missing a double-quote from a link could be so destructive...nearly destroyed the whole blog.

Broadband = nice. My ADSL modem looks like something out of War of the Worlds but only took 5 minutes to set up, hurrah! So now timeouts and dropped connections are a thing of the past, and 4mb mp3s take 45 seconds to download instead of 8 minutes. Telewest have responded to my defection by breaking the telly. Again.

In other news, Albert is back after his phantom FTP trouble, and so is Wibbot (and friend) - who has been in talks concerning his imminent starring role in internet remake of Where Eagles Dare, inspired by Franco-Simian classic short Le Punch-up.

Owing to Quinquireme being on holiday, FatBoy and Minkus (see catblog) have come to visit, and have already exhibited mastery of various activities: sleeping, vacant staring, eating, silly rolling, playing with jingly ball and mewking for no reason. Still, they haven't made any marks on the carpet and have stopped lurking under the bed, though we are still living in fear of Minkus' legendary bum-clawing abilities.

At school, things are becoming complicated (but not in an Avril Lavigne sort of way), as we have got the go-ahead for our Magic Application That Does Everything, so I will probably be knocking bits of code together before I have fully understood the huge scope of it. Oh well, it might give me a diversion from watching the BBC news ticker, which is what I spend most of the day doing.

Only 3 days to go until broadband - I have to say that BT's customer services beat Telewest's arbritrary waiting times shambles into the frozen ground with a big stick.

For breakfast, I had a Marmite sandwich and some tablicks (to which I have recently added iron), while L is having a chip butty made with last night's chips. Yum.

Poor old Albert has been censored by the Chinese government, despite obviously being the People's Primate.

At school I have been building a 15-language dictionary compiler (complete with progress bars which I am particularly proud of) and am now throughly enmeshed in the problems of automated linguistical analysis and the illogical nature of semantics. And being thoroughly verbose at the same time.

I have a new computer on the way, thanks to the skills of notoriously slow car-builder but notoriously quick Java programmer Toby. Nice and cheap too, so current computer will be given to L to further her career of speaking every language known to man (or beast). Not sure if we've got room for two computers though.

Wibboty has gone AWOL so there may be someone else temporary filling his role as the Internet's Top Light Entertainer. Which reminds me, did Lorraine Kelly really mean to call her book this or is it just my interpretation that suggests infant cannibalism?