Odd, it was acting like the power had been switched off, which wasn't the case. No amount of switching plugs/sockets/anything would have it come back on. A friend poked it and managed to get it to come back to life, telling me it looked like a fuse had gone inside it. Alas, while the lights were on, no one was home - dear old router would not connect to the internet but seemed ok acting as a switch between computers. By this time, I'd dug out our 7-year-old BT modem with one port on it which enabled us to get back online... one at a time. And don't even think about using the USB attachment with anything other than Windows XP (which we don't have) - I had almost forgotten what the Blue Screen Of Death looked like but I've built up enough reserves of it while trying to use that thing to last me a while. My genius idea of using the dead router as a switch with the BT modem somewhat worked... As long as I was ok being tethered to said router (er, no) and that again, only one person wanted to use the net at once. Conclusion: switch also dead.

What with various emergency trips to France (my grandmother is not well :( ), funds are not exactly great at present so today it was off to the local overpriced PC shop to get whatever was cheapest. Came back with an almost identical model to the last one, but this one seems to have two aerials, better speeds and has some super duper secure something-or-other setting. The advantage of it being pretty much the same meant that I could restore a backup of the settings on the old router and get up and running in minutes without the need to redo all the security and setting up new passwords on all our wireless devices (ick).

Phew. RIP, Netgear DG834GT. You served us well.

In other news, I have rejoined The Q*Bee after (almost) 2 years. W00t! Come trade with me! :D
Oh, and Lucy recovered fine from her surgery :) The cone came off a couple of days after the last entry and we had no problems since. She's been bouncy ever since :D

In other news, the lovely Lilian has made me a layout which I will try and put up at some point. Scott has also made me a layout, perhaps my failures with Photoshop (see previous entry) really are that obvious... Oops.

PS. Apparently 'conehead' is slang for a druggie or something. I should add that my cat is absolutely not a druggie (...to my knowledge, anyway...) and I'm simply referring to the fact that she has an Elizabethan collar (aka cone) on her head. Just in case anyone was confused, k? K. :P

So. Not only do I need inspiration, I also need your help: tutorials! Photoshop CS4 is very different to CS or whatever it is I used last and I'm lost. I've been pointed towards Tutorial9 and psd.tuts+ which are both very good but I'm open to other options too :)

This year I have 0 resolutions because I never make any, but I do hope to achieve some things in the next 12 months, including losing some sort of weight and becoming fitter - but considering I ate half a large cheesecake yesterday, that will probably not happen. Mmm, cheesecake. :9 I also have a wedding to plan and go through with and a holiday to Florida to go on. :D

So, happy 2010 to one and all, hope it brings you happiness and whatever else you wish for. :)

You only need to update if you're using PHP 5.3+ and/or you are having problems with your verification image showing up. :)

So far, so good. Gmail has caught lots of spam and genuine messages have got through. I'm a bit worried that all my forwarders won't work since I used multiple domains and Gmail doesn't seem to want to differentiate between domains... blah@domain1 is the same as blah@domain2, it seems. Oh, and the IMAP interface takes some getting used to, but I've been using it at work with no problems and Thunderbird seemed to be coping well so here's hoping it continues for my own account.

I did have a minor problem though... I had all my PHP-generated emails (e.g. new comment notifications, etc) go through my old SMTP gateway. Of course, that no longer works now since I'm all Gmailed, and Gmail seem to want an SSL connection when sending email and I can't work out how to do that in PHP right now (any ideas? Let me know! I know we had all sorts of issues at work doing it and Google weren't too happy at the end anyway so not sure if it's worth it...). Hope my ISP doesn't mind me using their SMTP for now, heh. :D

Right then, two weeks off :D I hope I can finally get round to finishing PAI/Askably/whatever-it's-called-these-days v3.1 as it's kind of been in the works for 2 years... Small matter of Christmas getting in the way but maybe I'll find some time here and there. Get any feature requests in now if you have any, the main point of this release is to tidy up coding and such really, database queries are stupidly ... stupid ... in v3.0 and need optimising, as well as the actual coding structure being awkward and full of stuff I thought I knew but really didn't. Busy busy!

• Boyfriend's parents came to visit with their dog a couple of weeks ago. Lucy was not impressed and hid behind the sofa the whole time
• 2 days later, boyfriend crashed our car (again). Minor incident in some very wet weather where he skidded and hit the kerb hard enough for the passenger side airbag to deploy. *Sigh*, there goes our no claims again...
• Some people in boyfriend's family were involved in a serious accident in which their car was written off - they were not hurt though
• I was waiting in our hire car for aforementioned boyfriend to come back from paying for petrol the other day when there was a power cut and some guy got into the car thinking it was his (he left when I pointed that out)
• Our shower broke the day before bf's parents were due; it's an electric shower so getting that fixed/replaced is not very simple
• Jem apparently popped out a baby... Obviously though that's for her to talk about not me :P
• Melissa revamped and reopened her site with a design I could never possibly manage :( /emo
• I reformatted my laptop and installed Windows 7 on it. Quite honestly there's not that much of a difference, but my old Vista installation was crumbling slightly and a reformat was well overdue

And! There might be a new layout around here soon. Sarah and Scott have both said they would design me one because I have no inspiration whatsoever and this layout is boring the pants off me.

So there you have it, lots of excitement and stuff. Wheee!

The US goes back next week which will make things interesting... Must now remember the differences are -4/-5/-6/-7 (east to west) for each of the main timezones instead of -5/-6/-7/-8. Certain parts of Australia have gone forward, so that means the time difference in Sydney is ... +11 hours, I think. Oof. Makes things difficult if I actually want to speak to anyone there and even worse for New Zealanders who are 13 hours ahead... So, er, if you live over there in the Pacific, good morning and happy Monday to you. And happy spring/summer too, enjoy the sun while we freeze and get battered by wind and rain... *Grumble* ;)

In other news, Lucy is about 3 times the size she was when we got her, has far too much energy and generally treats everything as a scratching post. Right now she is running about on the landing at top speed chasing ... probably nothing, and will probably not want to go to sleep when I do (she never does). I would post a picture but I haven't actually been able to take any as she never sits still for longer than a second. x_x

Oh, and I seem to have acquired one of those Wii things. I don't play video games usually, but someone at the boyfriend's work had one they didn't want so we took it from them :) Also came with Wii Fit which is interesting. Apparently my fitness age is 80 because I am lazy and never do anything. Hmmm.

And in case you hadn't noticed, Windows 7 appeared last week (amid 3259820935 postal strikes here in the UK anyway). Luckily my preordered copy was sent by courier so I got it on Thursday :D No, I haven't installed it - it was for the boyfriend's PC. It came with the 32-bit and 64-bit editions in one, but only one license :( So if I want to put it on my laptop (currently has Vista... Ick) I'll have to buy another copy which MS want to charge £150 for (the copy we got was preordered at 1/3rd the price!). As far as I know they don't do licenses on their own just yet but meh. Vista's alright for now, I'm not that sick of it... I do want to reformat my laptop at some stage though, it's getting slow and clunky and there's a lot of rubbish on it I could be getting rid of. I'd rather be putting Windows 7 on at that point but if I don't have it then no big deal I suppose. :P