Everything else seems to be ticking along nicely though, apart from all the things we’ve completely forgotten about that will rear their heads in the next few weeks anyway!

Carol & I plan on visiting Knabbs Ash shortly for a weekend break, which is always a pleasure. It’s good to feed my Yorkshire roots and to give Carol the chance to experience the right side o’t Pennines!

A week later my card gets declined in Sainsburys (yeah tell me about it, trying to go upmarket like that was my downfall!). Turns out they received the letter, but because it was in one of their envelopes it looked like a returned letter, and standard practise seems to be to put an account on hold if they get any bounced mail (without trying to contact me via another route at all, of-course).

So now they’ve re-enabled it and are sending out fresh forms so I can challenge the transactions again.

This time I’ll find a clean envelope.

We’ve been cake tasting at Cakes By Carol and have ordered the cake. We’ve got the honeymoon booked – two weeks in the Lakes (a week each at different places). (We’ll do something more adventurous the following year, but after all the wedding build-up we want a rest not another adventure!) I’m sure there are many other jobs to do but it feels like we’re getting on top of things!

The more we spend time on this the more I’m looking forward to it, I can’t wait another 10+ months!

So I’m trying out BloGTK to see if that’s an easier way to do things….

AVG didn’t spot it. Microsoft’s Live scanner found it but couldn’t remove it. I’m pretty sure all anti-virus scanners do it give you a false sense of security – I’ve now tried some scanners from McAfee, Norton, BitDefender and others (run from a clean machine) and none of them have been able to accurately find all the virus infected files.

Of-course this shouldn’t be possible. As far as I can tell the virus got installed when I ran an infected installer for another program, so even if I didn’t have admin rights as a user (which of-course I did have anyway, this is XP) I’d have needed to use admin rights to install it. I’m pretty sure that the same methods of infection wouldn’t be so effective in Linux but that’s my gut feeling not something I have confidence in.

It really shouldn’t be that hard to make it impossible for one application to mess with another application’s files. Certain files, like explorer.exe, should basically be untouchable (except via Windows updates etc). Each application should be restricted (“chroot”ed, in Linux terminology) to it’s own directory so that it simply cannot access files outside that area. I do know one thing: My Linux desktop, which I use most and which sees the most activity (email, software installation, etc) has not yet been vulnerable to the sort of viruses and spyware that seem prevalent on Windows.

So I’m mid-reinstall; I have XP installed, and SP3, and now most of 200Mb of updates; I’ve been working through the reinstall for several hours and I’ve so far needed 4 reboots and had to hunt down several drivers, for essential hardware like network, video and sound cards. Once that’s done I’ll be able to install basic apps like wordprocessors, PDF viewers, and the like. If only XP were actually ready for the desktop!

Actually I think this is a good idea; technology often needs big challenges to drive it forward and the resulting developments often advantage the rest of us mere mortals.

Technology is great, you see. If it wasn’t for technology I’d have to burn my toast manually instead of having a machine to do it.

But maybe one of those technologists could take time out from their moon missions to explain to me why it is that a standard toaster does not have slots big enough for a standard slice of bread? Is it one of those pesky inches vs millimeters metric conversion problems? Is it a uniquely UK problem?

So I have a brand new toaster from a well known supermarket (where “every little helps”), and a standard thick sliced loaf from the same store, and I either have to cut off the crusts to get the slices into the toaster or squash them in whole (which means prodding and poking the hot toast to get it out again).

Which brings me to my conclusion: man must not only set off for the moon – and onwards to Mars – but he must develop the tools for making toast in space in the hope that the benefits trickle down to my breakfast table.

And while he’s at it, a non-dribble teapot would be great, too.

Apparently the new cool thing to do is register domains like jackoisdead.co.uk within hours of his death, many of which appear for sale on eBay shortly afterwards.

The Internet has clearly made the world a richer place!