Not long ago I joined Twitter, to see what all the fuss was about. So far so good - I like it. I like it because I can make those silly short pointless posts that used to come here in LJ land. Things like "I'm sooooo hungry!" or "Last night I dreamed of flying pizza - bizarre!". Think of it as reducing the spam on my blog. All those spam posts neatly in one place, tidy and ignorable. I also like it because, so far, it seems to be filled with intelligent people. I dislike Facebook for the oposite reason - it's full of my friends, true, and is useful in it's own way, but I HATE it for socialising. Too many people throwing unfiltered crap at my front page. Too many uses of multiple exclamation marks. Too much l337 anf text-talk. However I have not yet found a site I like as much as Livejournal for being suited to ME. It's flows at a nice pace, the content interests me, I can find nice people and useful communities with relative ease (though I'd prefer a better search engine, tbh).

Anyway, Twitter recently has started doing something odd. Or, rather it's image-hosting twin TwitPic has. It only seems to affect my work computer, but about 1 in 5 attempts to open an image with TwitPic will crash Internet Explorer. The page won't load - no progress bar, just a continually fluttering Windows flag in the top right corner. The wierd thing is when it does this every page I try to open from then on will also fail to load - it's like the network has just cut out. Windows does not recognise this as an error, but it is very simply rectified by closing IE and re-opening it. No idea why it does this, but it's not a big enough problem to bother our IT guys about. I'll just put up for now.

I seem to have woken up a little since this morning. A strong coffee and a latge lunch have done the trick. I'm not exercising today though - I'm giving my body the day off! Hopefully back to the daily cycle tomorrow once I've recovered. :)

I'm trying to record a very simple macro in Word, but it's not working for me! I want to record Paste Unformatted text (because it infuriates me how there's no shortcut key for this and i use it all the time). I record the macro but when I use the shortcut key I've assigned (Ctrl+Q) it just pastes as standard (usually html).

The code in the macro window is as follows:

__________________________________________
Sub PasteUnformatted()
'
' PasteUnformatted Macro
' Macro recorded 5/14/2008 by Laura Foster
'
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)
End Sub
__________________________________________

Anyone know where I'm going wrong?

A friend of ours rather sneakily lent us a copy of WoW. It feels like being offered that first hit of an illegal substance by some bloke on the streets. Sure, it's a free 10 day trial, but will you be able to simply abandon your character after that?

Fat chance. I was playing for about three hours last night, jam_warrior played until 3.30am. It's awesome! I'm playing a night elf druid, he's a gnome rogue. The game reminds me of Diablo II, except rather than following a set plot with set quests you have an absoluetly enourmous world with billions of quests and exploring and people everywhere and sexy half-naked dancing elves (played, I expect, by middle aged men who still live with their mums).

The thing is, to truely get the best out of this game, we're not just going to have to fork out for the upgrade and the monthly fee. We're going to have to buy a laptop. We have two friends who are usually online at the same time, and it would be unfair if only myself or Jam could connect with them at any given time without going to a geeky lan party or something. So, yeah - we need a laptop!

To be honest there are numerous times when I've felt a laptop would be highly useful, and there will probably come a time in our careers when we'll need one for work anyway (hah!). Times like when we're visiting relatives (my parents have a good omputer made crap by my little brother filling it with barely legal download software, Jam's mum has a nice work laptop but her school's head of IT hasn't granted her admin access so you can't insall anything on it), or.. well, that's about it really. Still, it would be nice, and we could afford it right now, although we are meant to be saving up for house deposits (but that's what parents are for, I'm led to believe!). We wouldn't want an awesome tablet or anything like that - just a sandard portable with a good graphics card and enough RAM to run the game. I'm thinking around £500, but I may be underestimating here. We'll see.

I just hugely impressed my colleagues with what they seem to think is my instoppable computing ability. I (*gasp*) plugged in some speakers, installed Windows Media Player and started playing a Christmas CD in the office computer that can actually do these things (our work station computers do not allow you to mess with any settings beyond volume control and background image). It's amazing how even a rudamentary grasp of Windows functions can amaze techno-phobic middle-aged women.

So we at last have what I hope is a reliable CD player in the office on which to play various nasty CDs, including choral christmas songs, Cliff Richard and whoever it was sang that Amarillo song that took the nation by storm a year ago. I'm planning to burn a new copy of my own Christmas compilation (featuring such gems as Eels, The Webb Brothers and, of course, The Pogues feat. Kirsty McColl. Bless her).

So whee, Christmas music!

Yesterday being the Open Doors Day in Bristol we went to two venues - Redcliffe Caves and Ashton Vale Cemetary.

The former is a network of old mining tunnels that cover about 4 acres. Bits of it are suitable only for experienced cavers, but a path had been laid out for members of the general public to wander round. It was really excellent! Pitch black inside, and torches were required. The light provided by dozens of people waving round little torches (and at times mobile phones) gave you a good idea of the overall structure of the caves, but you could still only clearly see a tiny bit at a time. Since the caves were largely hollowed out manually they're fairly regualr, with impressive arches and pillars. Here and there you can see 100-year olf graffiti, which has been preserved as art work. Little doodles of faces and squiggles on the bare rock face done by a bored miner in the early C20, now admired by tourists. :)

It took us a good 45 minutes to wander round, peering into holes and expecting to see a skellington at any moment (sadly not so).

Ashton Vale Cemetary is a 45 acre wildnerness in massive disrepair. Bits of it are preserved nicely, but the majority of it has been reclaimed by nature. Ivy grows over ancient crumbling tombstones, ash and birch trees growing up through long-forgotten graves and wildflowers dotted around. There were loads of brambles whcih kept me happy throughout our wander. It really is beautiful. There's a massive resoration project taking place at the moment, but I hope they leave some of the trees and wild growth, because it makes it such a gothicly beautiful setting. I got some good photos as well, which will be posted at some point.

For now I'm killing time in Jam's lab office, making use of the internet when I can get it. Our computer still isn't ready. To be honest I'm not surprised - my experience with small computer shops is that they take on work and make promises that they have no chance of fulfilling. He promised us a comuter built in a day - is that even possible? What annoys me is the guy's insistence of lying to us. 'I tried phoning the number you left but either I couldn't get through or there was no answer'. 'The processor was delivered to my old address by accident'. I really wouldn't mind him just admitting he's busy and hasn't got round to it yet, but instead he tries to give us the run around. I don't mind too much for now, but if he keeps trying it on I'll start to get pissed off.

We've bought a new computer! Or, rather, we've ordered one to be built for us. We spent about an hour in a nearby computer shop chatting the the owner about what we wanted out of the new machine, and he suggested a built for us out of the desired componants. It's going to cost about £600, but that's with a good graphics card (about £200 of graphics card, in fact, so The Sims 2 should run like a dream!) and with adequate processor speed and memory for running PSP and Animation Shop (which, annoyingly, I'll have to purchase legit now since I won't be able to transfer my dodgy copy across. I could, of course, install Photoshop since I have it on disc, but I'm loathe to do so since I've spent the past five years learning how to use PSP and I'm not keen on learning anotehr programme from scratch).

Hopefully it'll all be ready by the end of next week. Then we can have the internet again from the comfort of our leather Ikea office chair. Jam's even been talking about getting the kind of games that our old machine couldn't run, like Pirates! and Oblivion. Not that he has the time to play these, mind you... :)

I've been playing Chibi Robot mildly obsessively. I started yesterday and played for just over 5 hours straight, which is kind of scary and the sort of thing I never do! Then I woke up at 7.30am this morning and crept out of bed, made myself a cup of tea and played until Jam woke up and The Archers started at 10.00. It's one of those games that is so hard to stop because litte tasks keep coming up, and you just have to finish this one bit, but then another bit comes along and you'll just do that one... then if you don't have anything to do you have to run about until you find a task, and then you have to complete that task... That combined with the fact that it's very odd and very silly, may explain why I've played it for seven and a half hours since lunchtime yesterday.

There's loads of things I want to do online but haven't got round to yet, because I don't like doing them sat in a computer room at Bristol University, or sat in Jam's office as I am now. Apparently interesting things are happening in Scarygoround, so I'll have to catch up on the past three weeks soon.

I miss my computer at home! :(