I've gone off this driving thing - my left leg hurts. And by hurts I mean the muscle is really painful even when I'm not using it. And what doesn't help is that because it was hot last night when I went to bed I decided to leave the window open a bit. Which turned out to be a really bad idea because not only could I not sleep because the bed didn't get cold enough but I also couldn't sleep because my eyes felt all funny and my nose was horrid. Tonight I have put the bunny in the freezer, so I can freeze my feet off instead. I really need it to rain quite a bit and do something about all this pollen.

Three people have posted their stories for the Doctor Who Fic Fest already, including Always which is for my Sarah & Harry audio request. I vaguely know how mine starts but still don't have any sort of plot yet.

The long one I'm writing (working title: Sarah Jane drinks lots of tea*), I'm still partway through version 2 of. Except that last night I added a new bit of the plot in, as when I read it through I realised I'd laid down loads of clues but not explained anything. Mostly because I still hadn't decided exactly whodunnit. But now it has added Tenth Doctor and Rose in it.

And now the sun's going down it's getting cooler - my computer's fan has even gone off! - so I might actually be able to stay in the vicinity of my computer to actually do some work on it.

I have also discovered the usefulness of Word. And by Word, I mean word processing packages that are more word processy than WordPad and are not Word. If you type teh it changes it to the! If you don't quite hit the shift key at the beginning of a sentence it capitalises it for you! And you can see how many pages you've done, which is very cool. My only trouble now is deciding whether I want to use Word Pro or Open Office. Oh, decisions, decisions.

* I counted and in the first draft she explicitly drinks six cups, in 11,000 words.

I now have a working right shift key, with thanks to my friend and some superglue. And then I used it to bring my Jack/Liz fic up to version 3. I seem to get to v5 pre-beta these days, so one of the things on my big list of things to do this weekend is to print it out and get it to v4 at least. I got overexcited and started my remix fic as well. Although by started I mean wrote four paragraphs and got stuck.

I squeed at The Avengers last night. It was all set on trains and in stations, and at the start we saw a man running between a whole load of stationary trains. There was a lovely long shot from above and they all looked like the type of trains we had in our electric train set. Which was very exciting. At the time they seemed more like real trains should be than real trains. It's almost disappointing now that you can get ones that look like Virgin trains - why would you want to?

If I hadn't left work late I was intending to watch Quantum Leap, which I had just discovered was on ITV3 at 6pm. It was only after I realised I wasn't going to make it on time that I realised this meant it would have adverts in and I just can't cope with that. It was only later that, given I'd have to pause it anyway to deal with dinner that I realised it doesn't matter cos I'd fast forward through them. It's a bit academic anyway cos I have them all on CD but there's just something different about watching them on real TV.

It's quite handy having space for 6 LJ icons because it means I can get my appropriate bad day one out.

As we're so busy at work at the moment I decided to go in early, as I didn't want to be staying late, so I set my alarm. But, as I discovered at 8.30 this morning, failed to actually turn it on.

I thought that as my landlady's radio was on, and at that time she's usually getting dressed (with her radio on) that I'd wait a bit till she left, and in the meantime had breakfast and checked my email. I turned out, at 9.05, that she was actually still in bed and at that point got up and ran a bath. At which stage I gave up on being able to wash my hair, and went in. Needless to say, I still had to work late.

The most annoying thing at the moment is that because I was off last week I don't really know what's going on, so I don't know what I need to do tomorrow, or the rest of the week. I'm guessing it's going to be busy though.

I haven't had a chance to go to Tescos for a couple of weeks, so my fruit and veg collection consists of two grapefruit and an apple. Waitrose might be able to provide me with another apple, if I scrabble about, but I'm not quite sure what I'm going to be eating before I can go shopping on Saturday.

I managed to rip off my right shift key on Monday night. I really didn't want to spend hours on the phone to India, so I thought I'd email them. It took me two days to get the website to do anything when I clicked on the relevant link. Now it tells you you can email them. Hmm, helpful.

So instead I chatted with them - which took two days as well (the first time it refused to believe I was a home customer). After ten minutes spent proving I really am me as who knows what phone number/address/email address/name they have on their system. How you're supposed to guess I do not know.

The Indian I spoke to (it was blindingly obvious) tried to tell me it was under warranty, then told me it wasn't, you can't replace one key only a whole keyboard, you can't get them online only through an expensive phone number, and he couldn't tell me how much they'd cost. I'm not entirely convinced I believe one word he(?) said.

Halfway through the chat I was suddenly typing in the dark - the electricty ran out of money. Who ever thought a source of electricty that randomly runs out is a good idea, I don't know.

Luckily, I have a friend who knows about computers, and where to get spare parts, so he might be more helpful. I don't know why I put a might in that sentence. Handily, I only use the right shift for ?. I am confusing myself completely by typing | a lot instead, as my brain associates typing ? with pressing the key next to shift.

On the plus side I am halfway through The OC (perfect when you have no brain), I have large amounts of chocolate in the fridge, 100 mp3s set up to play in Winamp and Jack/Liz to get from version 1 to 2.

My computer is all better now. Basically, something in the screen had broken, so that after a few minutes the screen went so dark you could barely see anything on it. And when it wasn't dark it was a bit red (my old computer, on the other hand, has had a distinctly red screen for years now). Luckily, it is still under warranty, so I spent three hours on the phone on Wednesday night to Dell technical support, trying to get them to send an engineer out.

If you've never had to phone them up before you're lucky. They've moved their call centre to India, so you get to speak to people who know less about computers than I do and incidentally, don't understand a word you say. 30 minutes of that three hours was spent trying to give her my address. I've rung them before and they've either just made the problem worse, or just told me to reinstall Windows and not really cared about trying anything else. They do have a tendency to try and get you to go to a website as well, which is a bit tricky when your computer doesn't work. I only ring them as an absolute last resort.

Anyway, the engineer was great, fixed it in 10 minutes. Now my screen looks a bit blue - that could just be because it was a bit red before Wednesday and I had got used to it. It's also very clean, which, strangely, is making everything look quite textured. Dell do two types of laptops, Inspiron and Latitude. The engineer told me that Inpsiron is dealt with by the Indians, but Latitudes are dealt with by the Irish. I've spoken to them many years ago before the Indians even existed (you know what I mean) and you can't understand a word they say, but they're very helpful.

Possibly all the stress of that, and work, and not sleeping has got to me. Friday night I very nearly went to bed at 7.30pm. Saturday morning I got up to go to the ZZ9 AGM in Nottingham, fell over half the stuff on my floor because I was dizzy, and went back to bed instead. I impressed myself last night by staying up till 9pm. I also have the office cold, so I am wondering if it's just me being more tired than usual, or whether I have flu (despite having had the flu jab).

In slightly more exciting news, I am rec'ing Lord of the Rings on Crack Van for December. I've managed to get my recs list down to the maximum allowed, which was hard enough. I was feeling quite accomplished until I realised I need to work out what to say as well. But as I'll not be posting any of them until Friday (I'm busy on the 1st), I'll worry about it later I think.

...my computer is sick - hardware sick, which means it'll take longer to fix than if it's software sick. I think I know what's wrong (it seems to be a common problem on the Dell Inspiron forum), which is a start. I do have my old computer but I only have emails I've received since about 8am this morning, and I can't remember what I had marked as unread in Abilon.

The only good thing is that I emailed a couple of fics I'm writing to my gmail account, so in theory I should get a lot of writing done in the next few days! (It's all backed up on a 750mb zip drive. My old computer will only read & write 100mbs, my new computer will read all but only write 750mbs. Oh, the fun.)

Work wasn't quite as bad as I was anticipating today, at least on the work side (although that could be because I've ignored some of my emails). What I had forgotten is that we're having the office painted (suicide yellow) starting last Monday. So I spent half my time trying to find my stuff, smelling paint fumes and sitting in the cold (open window to try and get rid of said fumes).

On the plus side, my USB extension leads arrived, so I can actually move my keyboard close enough to type! On the downside somehow my computer is set to install Windows updates at 4pm, then annoy me every 10 minutes for the next 2 hours by asking me to restart (and if I don't get rid of it within 5 minutes, it'll restart anyway). So I was ecstatic about that, especially given that I can't change it for some reason. They IT guy is away, but I bet he's done something really strange, will have a really bad reason for it, and won't change it back.

I also went for my flu jab, at which the nurse decided to stab me as well, just for some extra entertainment. Which hurt.

But I have made it to version 2 of my Five Things fic! Yay! I'm still not happy with most of it, though, so it'll go up to at least v4 before beta.

I have also given in and put my winter coat on. So now I'm warmer with fewer jumpers, which is quite cool. The hat is not coming out yet, I'm not admitting to that much cold, and the scarf is coming out for Harry Potter, but that's mainly for the coldest of colds.

And why does this LJ plugin keep thinking I want to post with my old default icon instead of my new one?

Today was not a good computer day. The link was wonky between us and the main building, where the server is, so we had times where we couldn't do a thing for 10 minutes. It should only have affected the network drives, and not the actual computer as well, so why it did, I have no idea. Probably just to be annoying.

I spent most of the day setting up my new computer. It is so fast in comparison to the old one, and in things I wasn't expecting at all as well. So I was all happy with that (and my nice, new wallpaper of two guys kissing) and went to plug it in to my monitor, keyboard, mouse etc. Where there was just one small problem. The keyboard and mouse have PS2 connections. Dell don't seem to think people use these any more. Grr.

I'm very attached to my keyboard (I had a crap one until I nicked this one off someone when they left) so I refuse to have a new one. I also want to try out my Nemo mouse (which for some reason doesn't work with my current computer). So now I have to wait for some adaptors. More grr.

And then tonight I thought I'd have a game of Just Shoot The Thing (brilliant thing I found ages ago. It's a short game where you...just shoot the thing. While trying to avoid the thing shooting back at you). It refused to play, so I easily found it on the net, redownloaded and installed it. Except that as I was playing about with it on my start menu, Explorer thought that it would be far more fun to crash. As it does often. My Explorer is definitely Not Right.

Anyway, at this point Just Shoot The Thing decided to join in the party and I only really remembered the controls before it crashed as well. Twice. At which point I gave up and restarted. And did some work on the Arathorn/Gilraen thing.

I wrote myself a plan last night and put dates on it. Which was, worryingly, more fun than writing the thing itself. But still, it told me where I had a whole load of scenes all set in the same month, and elsewhere gaps of a year. Which meant that the scenes I'd been thinking about putting in, have been put in (although not written, I should point out).

I also remembered, as I wrote a touching reconciliation scene (or it will be touching with a few rewrites) that actually, the two people in question had an argument about which to reconcile. I remember exactly when it happened, just not why. Hopefully it'll come back to me at some point.

I actually managed to write about 800 words, pasted in Anniversary, which I wrote for an HA list thingy ages ago, which started this whole fic off in the first place, so now it's just under about 12,000 words. So I'm feeling quite impressed with myself (and not thinking about birthday drabbles I haven't even looked at for months or drabble communities I haven't either)

I found out today I have 1.83GB of temporary files on my computer. Which, with my 80GB hard drive, isn't a terribly high percentage. I'm just getting used to that but my old computer only had 6GB - now 2/6 is a very big number! I'm quite impressed, that although I have just under half the number of temp files than dad, they take up just over more than twice the space

What does annoy me though, that where these temp files are is the default setting for where Outlook Express wants to save it's attachments. I haven't bothered changing it having heard about dad's efforts to do the same (it's not quite as ridiculous a place as Trillian wants to save its files as well).

I accidentally saved one there once (it is so complicated to do and I'm always wanting to press the buttons in the wrong order) and I couldn't work out what I couldn't find it. Turns out it was hidden. I thought hiding the Send To was ridiculous, but this just takes the biscuit. Temp files are useless unless they're currently being used, in which case Windows won't let you delete them! Urg.

On the plus side I've gone up to 408th in Fantasy Wimbledon, as of yesterday's matches. I had a few players go out today so I'm not too hopeful. And here's the Fannish Friday 5 because the questions are actually vaguely applicable!

1. What's the most you've paid for membership to a convention?

I think it would be something in the region of �70-80 for the Wolf SG ones. Which, if you factor in the price of the hotel and getting there etc, actually comes to the same amount as it cost me to go to the Isle of Wight for a weekend. So I look on it as a holiday - and how could you define staying in a hotel as not being a holiday?

2. What's the most you've paid for a zine?

I was going to say none at all but them I remembered Judith has written a follow-up to one of her Stargate stories and that one will be �7.95 I think.

3. What's the most you've paid for fan artwork?

Bugger, I thought that was none. But if that Stargate photo thing that everyone has from Expo, that's �14. Which wouldn't be quite so bad if it hadn't gone all funny.

4. What's the most you've paid for one season of a tv series?

That was looking cheap until I realised my Farscape series one or any oft he Babylong 5 seasons must have cost about �50. I'll point out that we are talking about 10-12 videos though (and I certainly didn't spend more than �5 on any one of them).

5. Do you regret any of your fannish spending?

No because there's not that much of it. Not in comparison to say, oh, rent. Or food. Or alcohol. And because I don't spend more money than I have, I'm not that stupid or desperate to have the latest stuff. That's what amazon was invented for

I've had a bad week and here's why:

• It was really hot at work on Monday and Tuesday and to make things worse I was migrainy Monday, but I didn't notice because it was giving me the same symptoms as the heat. So I didn't make it to Tae Kwon Do because I felt too ill. My hayfever also went rampant due to the heat. Having said that, it has improved since then and we are getting air conditioning at work the week after next (bets on how hot the next couple of weeks are going to be and how cold it'll be after we get it?)
• A friend of mine who is an IT technician at the school came round to look at my external hard drive. He couldn't fix it. It could possibly be the connector, but could also be the actual drive. I have all my videos on this drive (the ones I haven't got round to putting on CD yet). So I'm now trying to re-download them all. I should be mostly okay though, which is something. I've also bought a new external hard drive, which will be 60GB (the old one was 40GB) so I'll have more space on it, at least (since you can never have too much).
• That, coupled with spending more money on my glasses than I was planning to put away for Australia means I won't be putting any money away for it till August. The plan was to save for it before I went, so I would come back and have money. Don't think that's going to happen now.
• My computer at work is knackered, frankly. So since my boss is away I thought I'd use hers. But she has XP and I don't, so when I log on as me there are practically no programs loaded. I've been nagging the IT guy about sorting this out for weeks now, and guess, what? He still hasn't done it.

Apart from all that, there's just been a constant list of things to do and people needing me to do stuff. I really need to get some writing done and I haven't done any.

On the plus side I have now seen every episode of The West Wing, including the ones at the end of season 3 I saw before I had a clue what was going on. It was odd, going to that from season 5 - I hadn't realised how much I'd missed Sam until I saw it with him in again.

This weekend I am going up to uni, so I am determined to have a good time. And next week I will make it to Tae Kwon Do, twice; I will eat fewer biscuits; and as I'm only in one night next week I suspect I'll be rushing about, then relaxing at the weekend. Which I enjoy in a masochistic sort of way.

I finally got to see Harry Potter today. I can't believe it's only been out six days and it seems like everyone has seen it already. I'm most upset they've changed the uniforms. Okay, so it's nice to watch it without cringing but my Harry Potter scarf is no longer a Harry Potter scarf!

My external hard drive no longer works. I eventually got hold of a cable the right size at both ends and it still doesn't work. Which is not good because I have all my videos on it - the ones I haven't managed to put on CD yet.

On a better note, there are pictures from Farscape:Peacekeeper War (ie the mini-series).

I'd just like to say how much I hate computers and love the new control panel for my site. I wondered if XP had a BSOD, and guess what, it does! Needless to say my computer crashed twice tonight. I'm trying to work out whether it's more or less than my old one and then I remember that this one restarts in less than half the time. Plus I can't type on the old one anymore.

I've discovered that I can do all the things I have bravenet doing on my site with the control panel. How cool is that? I will have to have a play about with it at some point. Plus my new tracker tells me what people have google searched for. There was one hit from someone who searched for "beach swim trunks hi res". To be fair it is entirely possible I have used all of those words in the space of seven posts (or however many are on the main page, I forget) but I really don't think that was what they were looking for. 'elrond angst' on the other hand...

Other cool things I don't know how I lived without until now:

Roboform - no more typing in usernames and passwords! And it keeps a list of them. If anyone nicked my computer I'd be stuffed but since I have problems remembering my username, never mind my password (and in the case of one site, the answer to my security question) it's so helpful.

SpamNet - okay, so it does miss quite a few but I don't spend all my time adding my spam to the blacklist

Outlook Express with OE Quote Fix - smilies look like smilies! How cool is that? Plus colour to tell me who said what, sorting mail, marking as unread, actually replying below (although that doesn't work when people reply above - I suddenly find I can't find my sig). I still haven't got the hang of the keys yet though and I hate not being able to see e-mail addresses

The new version of WordPad - remembers I want to write in arial size 10!

TV on the computer

System Restore

Rubber duck! and fish!

Now I have new computer I can actually look at Blogger in hi-res mode - which looks like it used to. Very strange.

I've been playing about with this computer since Sunday, along with dad. We were doing really well until I plugged the mouse in on Monday. For some reason this computer doesn't have an ordinary mouse port, even though it has loads of others I'll never use. So we got an adaptor to plug it into the serial port. Which completely failed to work, so we installed the software. Big mistake! The drivers for the mouse and the trackpad conflicted so I couldn't use either, or the keyboard. This was after tech support had gone home, of course. In the end we had to reinstall Windows and start again.

Monday was an eventful day - I also couldn't find my wallet. In fact, I still can't. If I lost it on one of the trains I got on on Saturday and someone's handed it in it will eventually make its way to London. The people I've been ringing up there have been really unhelpful. And don't work weekends so I probably won't get an answer till Monday. And Smiths didn't have The Two Towers DVD, which was very annoying.

Anyway, I am now watching The Phantom Menace on ITV in the corner of my very wide screen (actually, its another ROTK trailer at the mo) and trying to decide on a new wallpaper. Very hard decision to make! I'm off to see Return of the King on Friday so I'm looking forward to that. I'm almost looking forward to going back to work and getting everything back to normal!

You are a Maia of Ulmo, Lord of Waters

Whose Maia are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

A couple of recs:
History Lessons: The Second Age - it's only just started by, judging by the quality of History Lessons, it's got to be good.
Further to Fly - I'm on a bit of a West Wing kick at the moment and this one is long and good with lots of people having crises.

This weekend I spend just over �2000 on a new computer and various accessories. The computer itself is arriving on Friday, although sadly it's being delivered to my parents house. Which means I won't get to see it until Christmas and won't get to use it much until the end of January. On the plus side I am getting broadband! It only works out as a few quid more a month than I'm paying now and freeserve is really quite amazingly crap. I had 303 ZoneAlarm alerts in half an hour last night and I wasn't even doing anything!

Feeling bored already and I haven't even been home a whole day yet! Took advantage of having a fast connection to download a load of music videos - I recommend Die Another Day by laurajo. It's listed near the bottom of the page. Watching all these videos is almost inspiring - almost because I wouldn't know where to start and don't have the time anyway.

Going to see Lord of the Rings tomorrow. I'm going to get my website updated at the moment. Dad had a demo of Unreal Tournament 2003on one of his computer mag DVDs, so I looked at the specs for it:

Operating System: WIN 98/ME/2000/XP
I have 98, so can just do that one

CPU: Pentium III or AMD Athlon 733MHz processor (*Pentium� or AMD 1.0 GHz or greater RECOMMENDED)
So Pentium II 233MHz probably not going to cut it then?

Memory: 128 MB RAM (256 MB RAM or greater RECOMMENDED)
How about 16Mb RAM?

Hard Disk Space: 3 GB
Total hard disk space: 6Gb, unused: about 600Mb (and thats quite a lot for me)

CD ROM or CD/DVD ROM: 8X
I'm not sure what my CD speed is, but the CD writer is 20x - finally a requirement I'm over the minimum for

Video System: 3D Accelerator card with 16 MB VRAM (*32-128 MB VRAM RECOMMENDED) 16 MB TNT2-class DirectX� version 6 compliant video card. (*NVIDIA GeForce 2/ATI Radeon RECOMMENDED) DirectX� version 8.1 (Included on game disc)
Well the original required 4Mb of video memory, it just about worked with my 2Mb, so I think not somehow.

The computer I want would cost �3000 but it would have 100Gb hard drive, CD-RW/DVD drive, 1024Mb RAM and 1.8GHz. But I would end up having the same problem in a few years time, so I think on balance I'd much rather go to Vancouver. I also really can't muster up the energy to think about having to set it all up.

Haven't written anything for ages! On Thursday I couldn't get online due to my modem/computer dying. I found out at the weekend it was the computer getting confused, poor thing. Then I've just watched loads of Alias really! Apart from Tae Kwon Do last night, which I am only now starting to hurt from. My stomach muscles, which I didn't realise I used ache, specially when I cough or laugh. Which is really helpful. I'm going to get a bruise on my arm where I blocked (sort of) a kick. And my left thumb really hurts, which is just weird.

Really annoyed that a nasty project at work got cancelled just as it was finishing. So I thought that meant I'd have a fairly easy week, as opposed to a bloody awful one. But no. Its actually meant more work. And whats more is that in a few weeks we have to do the entire thing all over again!

My landlady bought a new CD thing, so I've got hers. I didn't realise how many CDs I have. Mind you, two-thirds of them are videos. And I need to make some more as well. Really can't think about much past Michael Vartan at the moment. *sigh*