After listening to Ross Anderson on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning I went straight to The Big Opt Out and filled out the opt out templates for myself, Mrs Deryck and Deryck Junior. Until any British Government is able to deliver a big IT project on time, to budget and without a jungle full of bugs I will keep my information well away from it’s databases.

Doh! I feel for this and paid up. Yet Another Government IT Fiasco.

Admiralty arch … where I seem to have spent most of today.

I just added John Blade’s wp-mail hack to my installation of WP. Now I can upload photos directly from my mobile phone to this site. I put a cron job in to poll for new pictures every hour. His hack has a few bugs, the fixes are described here and there is a good tutorial on emailing posts to WP available in the Wiki too. An example is a picture that I took this morning, shown below.

Magdalene College, this morning

Tesco car park, Leytonstone (NOT photoshopped, I swear).

I installed Thunderbird last week as a replacement for Outlook Express. The principal reason was security, a secondary reason was to reduce the amount of bloated Micro$oft software on my computer and a third reason was to see if it was a big an improvement on OE as Firefox was on Internet Explorer.

Pros

• Easy to install
• Easy to copy email from OE (and other mail tools)
• Easy to copy server and account settings from OE (and other mail tools)
• Superb junk mail filtering that probably means I can ditch my knowspam account
• Good keyboard navigation and keyboard short cuts (eg, ‘n’ takes you to the next unread message, ‘j’ marks an email message as junk)

Cons

• Impossible to copy OE message rules to TB filters.
• TB filters are defined on an email account basis so if I wanted to put all my CSS emails into a single folder for each of my 3 POP accounts I would have to define the same rule/filter 3 times. Under OE I would only have to have done this once.
• Can only define one SMTP server

And today I had a particularly annoying problem. The same newsgroup posting appeared 4 times, I could not mark 2 of these posts as read. Then all the messages from that group were marked as unread. Then TB crashed. This happened several times. In the end I had to unsubsubcribe from the group, subscribe again and mark all the messages as read. A particularly annoying feature is that when you restart TB after a crash it displays by default a feedback form wizard so you can tell the folks who wrote TB about the problem. This is probably a good idea but really irritating when you just want to get back to work. I switched that feature off.
I’ll stick with TB for a while longer but at the moment it seems to be a moderate improvement over OE, not a quantum one.

Went to see The Aviator last night. An impressive film alright but didn’t really give you too much information about the man himself. A quick look at the Wiki entry for Howard Hughes revealed more that the film left out: 2 marriages, syphillis that may have been the cause of his OCD in later life and so on. But even the Wiki has probably just scratched the surface, the man was obviously very clever but why did he never get his high school diploma?

My new neighbours held a house warming party and invited all their neighbours round as well as their own friends and family. It was the first time that I had spoken to some of my neighbours. The topic turned to Vodka who it seems is well known to them. In one apartment she is known as Mona (”moaner”), in another as Billie (after the singer) and in another as Blaze. She receives food from all of them hence her low-slung belly. Embarrassingly I was asked more than once “is she pregnant?” Later in the evening Vodka joined the paty herself, nonchalantly walking in to an apartment with 50+ people in it and settled herself on the sofa ignoring the loud music but probably quite interested in the chicken drumsticks near by.