Someone suggested a lovely 'generic BBC science article' which might as well be a template for their site given how accurate it is. Most of the comments continue in the same vein as the comments on real articles, too.

New thing's that I'd not come known/come across before were, on Wednesday, some of the stranger items on eBay's 'Everything Else' category which are ... interesting. Particularly amused by the pink metal cage with a heart on it, which is clearly for your colour coordinated dungeon.

Also the Thursday thing was putting a duvet on more easily by turning it inside out. I'm sure I've tried it before but it was harder, so maybe I was doing it wrong .

Today's thing that I learnt was that viagra is very expensive. Not, I'll stress, by trying to buy some - Drobe mentioned that Tescos are selling it for £52 for 8 pills. Which seems very expensive to me, but then... I've got no need to know that, nor for them. I guess if you did, you might be happy to pay that but it just surprised me at the price.

I was also surprised to learn that the local Tesco Express seems to force the students from the local college to queue up rather than all go in en masse. Whereas we just talked straight in. Don't remember there ever being such a problem when we were at Sixth Form but then I was never one for piling down to the shops.

I'd been really quite interested in the stuff that IE9 was going to have in it and reassured by how they were working with other people quite well. Then they go and throw a bunch of proprietary things into the mix, and my happiness retreats. If they'd said how they were working with the other browser developers to make it play nice across the board that would be great. If they'd made it not a stupid format like .ico, with an expected size of 16x16, that'd be better. But... hey ho. I posted a little comment on the blog, although I'm not sure it'll make it there.

"Look at IE9, we're being really good for standards and we'll show you how bad everyone else is at conforming... BTW, we've added these bunch of non-standard features because we really need them and if you use a browser which is standards compliant you wouldn't want them anyhow." There have been a lot of posts on the blog saying how nice and standards compliant that the browser is, and how the team is working with the other browser developers and standards groups. That makes me feel good. But then to come along and announce a new, non-standard things, it wipes away a lot of good feeling. Any reassuring words about how you're working with the other browser developers to fit this in to their environments, and how it's expected to function in the future ? 16x16 .ico files ? kinda feels as shortsighted as the favicon.ico was - non-scaleable, and only intended as a leveraging feature for the Windows environment. [ IE9 disappointment; Me ]

Yesterday I found out what a 'Teddy' is, which - since I don't tend to have much involvement with lingerie - probably isn't too surprising. Today, I found out that Broadmoor isn't a prison, but a psychiatric hospital. This finding-out-stuff lark is fun.

I installed webmin a couple of days ago and since then my hard discs have not spun down. This is a little disappointing - assuming that the two are related, and I've got no reason to believe that they're not as there's been nothing else I've done that might affect that. Uninstalled webmin and we seem to be seeing the discs spinning down again.

Julian and I (mostly Julian) were lamenting the loss of Woolworths and he suggested that it'd be cool to have a Woolworths party - where you bring along random things from woolies, have a pick'n'mix and generally use it as an excuse to have some friends together. We looked it up and Woolies went into administration on 26th November 2008, so there's enough time to organise a party on the 2 year anniversary.

I got an email from Ebuyer today to say that they found my disc to be faulty and would replace it. I'd hope they'd replace it anyhow as they sold it without any warranty from the manufacturer.

Having got quite a few Western Digital drives, most of which I bought from Ebuyer, I thought it possibly useful to check that they had valid warranties.

hdparm -I /dev/[sh]d? | grep -e "/dev/[sh]d\|Serial N"

Does a nice little job of listing the drives and their serial numbers for checking. Stick those into the WD warranty checker and out come the answers of how long the warranties run for and if they're valid in this region.

Turns out the WD20EADS drive I bought in April is also an 'Out of Region' drive. Since I bought the drive with the expectation that I would have the manufacturer's warranty on it, I think that's pretty poor. I've left an 'eNote' at Ebuyer to ask for a replacement drive (which does have a warranty), as clearly what they supplied me with is not what they advertised.

And I'm pretty annoyed by that - it's not reasonable to assume that you have to check that what you've been supplied is as advertised when it's from a 'reputable' supplier like Ebuyer. Amusingly the Western Digital site appears to have stopped working tonight when I wanted to use it, so for checking some of the discs I missed (originally I forgot to check the 'hd?' drives) I'll have to wait for another day.

I've had I Don't Know You Any More, by Savage Garden stuck in my head first thing in the morning for the past week and a half. And when it pops into my head in the evening it's hard to kick.

Hopefully tomorrow I get some train ticket that I foolishly got delivered here, and not to work. That was just silly.

I've just organised the collection of my HD by a courier, through Ebuyer. As I did so it said that the parcel would be collected between 09:00 and 19:00. I was then asked what day I wanted it to be collected, and reminded that the parcel would be collected between 09:00 and 17:00. And finally I received an email from them, which confirms the collection Date/Time :Wednesday 8th Sep between 8am and 8pm.

Honest. I couldn't make this up.

Well, I could but it'd be pretty dull and I don't know why I'd waste my imagination on such things. It has far more fun telling me what a failure I am .

I spoke to Ebuyer this morning about the dead drive. They said 'it's out of the 1 year warranty that they provide so you'll have to return to Western Digital', I said 'WD says I can't because it's an Out of Region drive that was sold into the US', they say, 'give us a sec... oh, that has happened in the past and we're sorry. We'll replace the drive for you'. Which is pretty nice.

Looking through the computer today I noticed that I've got Monkey Island 2 on here - the new one. So I've been playing that a little today. It's kinda fun although I don't remember as much of it as I did original Monkey Island.

Caroline popped in for tea tonight, which was nice.

I had a drive that died in the server some time back, and I replaced with another. No big deal. I've finally got around to removing the drive from the server and trying to find what's wrong with it. It won't even respond through the USB SATA interface - eventually the USB device gives up trying to talk to it even.

So I fed its warranty information into Western Digital's warranty checker. It's in warranty, yay. It's not however valid for replacement because it's "out of region". Apparently this is a drive that was sold into the US market and isn't valid for warranty replacement in the UK. Which is a bit annoying. Since Ebuyer sold me this drive - in February 2008 - I guess I've got to take this up with them. It's just a bit of an annoyance to be so late in the day (well, years in this case) that I discover that I've been sold a drive without a valid warranty on it.

I've raised a return request with Ebuyer, and apparently I have to call them to progress the request. It shouldn't be very hard. They sold me a drive which had an invalid warranty and which has developed a fault. Therefore they should probably do something about sorting that out.

I'm watching Warehouse 13 (2009, Syfy)Action and Adventure/FantasyAfter saving the life of an international diplomat in Washington D.C., a pair of U.S. Secret Service agents are whisked away to a covert location in South Dakota that houses supernatural objects that the U.S. Government has collected over the centuries. Their new assignment: retrieve some of the missing objects and investigate reports of new ones.Warehouse 13 and earlier Claudia got spooked when she was spotted spying on someone and ran away, exclaiming 'zoinks!' and just now we had an 'oh jinkies'.

I'm eating a lot worse since I moved here. I used to cook most evenings, and now I just can't be bothered. Plus the evening seems to be gone so much more quickly. This might have something to do with not getting home until 7 though, whereas previously I'd be giving up at about 5:30. Or rather saying that I'm giving up and then tinkering for another hour or so, and treating it as my time rather than works. Which might be part of the problem.

I updated my film pages a few days ago so that they included simple images inside each element related to the series. So Moonlighting (1985, ABC)ComedyWhen former fashion model Maddie Hayes goes broke and finds that one of her few remaining assets is ownership of the Blue Moon Detective Agency, she is tempted to liquidate it until she meets the quirky employees and gets involved in their even quirkier cases. Moonlighting as a series was plagued by production delays and erratic scheduling. Scheduled episodes were often delayed for weeks and reruns substituted at the last minute. Many in-jokes and short fill-in pieces refer to this and other topical items at the beginning and end of some programs. Episodes 35 - 39 were particularly affected by this, and in their original broadcast contained intros dealing with the slow production pace. ABC Broadcast History March 1985 - February 1989: Tuesdays 9:00 PM April 1989 - May 1989: Sundays 8:00 PMMoonlighting gets its little logo above the list of episodes. The actual sections only show the episodes (say) when they're expanded - a little bit of Javascript does the expansion by changing the element from a 'display: none' to 'display: block'. Works really nicely.

Except that I showed it to some friends and they complained that it was taking an age. Now the page I gave them was admittedly 4M of HTML, but that doesn't take that long to transfer to them. It turns out that whilst Opera won't download images that are contained within an element which is 'display: none' and which would be displayed but for that, Firefox starts fetching them all regardless. So... my poor friends were trying to suck down about 40M of additional images that they wouldn't see unless they expanded every single section. Which seems a bit silly really.