"I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government"

I've made a daft mistake with my car tax this year. The bill came early last month with the total for the whole twelve months being £125.

A few days after this (I'm not sure exactly how much earlier) came the Budget. How I laughed when I found out that my brother-in-law would be paying £300 this year and £400 next year to tax his (needless, for him anyway) Chelsea Tractor!

A few nights ago I logged onto the directgov website to pay my car tax, and found out that because I was paying it post-Budget it would now cost me £140. Very good. I wasn't happy, but figured that I probably deserved it for laughing at my brother-in-law.

Anyway, according to my calculations that's a 12% rise in car tax. I thought they were meant to be tackling gas guzzlers, not 1.2l family cars? As per usual I'll have to try and find that money from somewhere, but it is just another way to get money into the Government's coffers stealthily.

Here I should mention that I don't have an affiliation towards a political party. I remember the Conservatives consistently hiking up the price of petrol, bringing down student grants and other such measures which have made my life harder financially. All political parties do the same one way or another: give with one hand, try and take with the other when they think we're not paying attention.

What I don't understand is the way the media seem to have reported the 2p cut in the basic rate of tax. They all seem to be saying, "It's marvellous!" without any mention of the elimination of the starting 10p rate of tax. Once again, giving with one hand, taking with the other.

If I was really smart/ruthless I'd flee this country in a second, honestly. However it's where my life is, where my family is and where my home is. For the most part I like living here, I just wish it wasn't so expensive sometimes. I'm sure I'm just one of the many people Her Majesty's Government bank on thinking this way.

How I organise my favourites

In response to this post on Lifehacker I thought I'd post how I organise my bookmarks.

I really only use Firefox at home and it is pretty easy to backup your bookmarks with that, so I don't really use anything else (although I'm beginning to dabble with social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us). I put my links within the following folders (sub folders as indicated) on Firefox:

Blogs
Bookmarks Toolbar Folder
Christian Resources
Firefox and Mozilla
Friends' Home Pages
Fun
Internet Resources
-- Charities
-- E-mail
-- Finance
Jobs
Live Bookmarks
Personal Home Pages
Podcasts
Quick Searches
Radio & Music
Search Engines
Shopping
-- Airlines
Social Bookmarks
Sports

Hmm, could probably do with being slighly more organised. Something to work on.

A busy week in

Just a quick post as I'm really busy this week. What's more I haven't been anywhere!

On Monday... I can't actually remember what I did on Monday. It seems like a long time ago (not kidding). I remember being up later than I planned to be though - I think Lorraine and I were assembling a list of possible questions for nurseries.

On Tuesday my in-laws were round, so my father-in-law and I found ourselves watching the Liverpool-Barcelona game (well worth it, very enjoyable) while Lorraine and her Mum bathed Chloe (n.b. Chloe wasn't in the bath for ninety minutes, although she would do if she had the choice as she's defintely a water baby). They stayed longer than we expected and then I had a bunch of forms to fill out. Another late one!

Last night Lorraine was out with Lucy for an Orange Wednesday at the cinema, so I was looking after Chloe for the evening. We were having a great time together along with Cookie, until eventually Chloe conked out as she finished her milk and fell asleep beside me on the sofa. With Chloe asleep I took advantage of Sky Sports' interactive coverage of the Champions League to flick between three games (Manchester United-Lille, Arsenal-PSV and A.C. Milan-Celtic). And there were still things to do when Lorraine got home - arrrrggghhhh!

Lorraine's working tonight so it's another evening with Chloe and getting very little done at home. My to-do list is getting longer, not shorter. I'm not particularly happy about it.

A few thoughts on Google Desktop Search

Just wanted to post a few thoughts on this. Just quick observations really.

1) I've never really had difficulty not finding anything I wanted to find via the standard Windows Search, regardless of the operating system (I've used Windows 95, Windows 98 and now Windows XP at home, NT and 2000 at work). This isn't offering me anything better in that respect.

2) When I'm playing Games (not often these days, admittedly) I use a different log-in and close all other applications down. Most of the applications which start automatically (things like anti-virus software, firewall, soundcard settings) can be shut down from the status bar. If you right-click on the Google Desktop Search icon it opens a web page and doesn't offer any option to quit the program. To actually close Google Desktop Search it seems that you have to CTRL-ALT-DEL into Task Manager, then close the program from there.

3) My biggest issue with Google Desktop Search? Just out of habit I tend to password-protect all my Word documents. Google Desktop Search makes that just about pointless, as password-protected files are hidden from the search, and a preview of the file can be seen in the results page!

Normally I'm a fan of what Google do, especially the growing Docs & Spreadsheets web interface. However Google Desktop Search doesn't really do anything for me. Just the opposite in fact. What I really need to do with it is to uninstall it.

Thoughts on Sorkin and A Few Good Men

One thing I love about buying films or TV series on DVD as opposed to VHS is all the bonus content that comes with it. A set of good extras is sometimes the difference between buying a DVD or leaving it on the shelf to me.

So when I made the big mistake of stepping into HMV during a sale and saw that the DVD of A Few Good Men was packed full of extras I left quickly, thought about it for a few days and then returned to pick up a copy. I love the film anyway, so why not pick it up?

Anyway, the most interesting extra on the DVD is a section relating to the adaption of the original play to a screenplay. While the parts with director Rob Reiner are somewhat interesting I found the interview with writer Aaron Sorkin fascinating. Stories as far apart as putting original ideas on napkins while he was writing the original play (which working as a bartender) to struggling to convert to a screenplay format. Very, very interesting. Highly recommended.

P.S. Typical, I recommend Sorkin and then I go to his wikipedia page which mentions he has some interesting ways of getting inspiration. Still a good writer though.

Christmas is coming...

And I had the pleasure of spending most of the weekend shopping in various guises. On Saturday I relented away from my "I'm not going shopping at weekends between now and Christmas" stand that I took about a month ago, and regretted it the second that Lorraine and I were walking the streets in Glasgow. Ugh, just horrible.

On Sunday we got the bulk of our food shopping, plus we paid a quick trip into Pets At Home to get presents for Cookie. The price of dog beds now is phenomenal in my opinion, but we put money aside for him to cover him for presents/vet visits/etc. so it is covered. Plus he's eleven now and we want to enjoy him while we have him. Chloe's starting to really enjoy him, getting to be more and more gentle with him and giving him hugs. Pretty cute really.

I've got lots of photos I need to upload to Flickr at some point. I think when I do I'll try and put in a post here to give some background on them.

An alarming evening

Got a phone call from Lorraine while I was at work yesterday afternoon, saying that there was a problem with the house alarm which was causing it to beep incessantly. It had done this before and eventually stopped, however this time when I got home it was still going.

We ended up having to phone an engineer, who came out and diagnosed the problem - a flat battery. The battery was replaced and before you could say "I'm skint this month", I was writing out a cheque for £105. Ouch. These things happen, just part of life. The timing could be better though (isn't that always the case?).

Haven't mentioned it here yet - we've got a new car. It is a Vauxhall Agila, not the most heralded of cars (to say the least) but the price was too good to ignore. It is compact but it does the job for us, I just hope it will be reliable. There's a small part of me which is worried that we got too good a deal (if that makes sense). It is three years old, had 15k on it (when we bought it) and is silver. At the moment it might almost tempt me into the weekend car washing community.

"I hope you die soon!"

Stumbled upon this on the TV tonight. Not very politically correct, but imitated umpteen times at school the day after it was originally shown.

What's up?

Well, not much, as per usual, although needless to say I've been finding ways to amuse myself.

Prison Break, Series 2
After a few weeks of trying I finally managed to find some torrents that worked for this. I downloaded episode 1 (looks superb) and was downloading episode 2 when we had a power cut. This actually led to what I had downloaded being completely out of sync. Silas-esque! If it leads Tweener to eat some bread in a disgusting fashion the tribute will be complete.

The 2006 Ryder Cup
Ugh, I hate Sky sometimes. I'd love to be watching this over the weekend, but I'm not paying for Sky Sports to do that. Just... ugh.

At least I know the difference between foursomes and fourballs now. That's one good thing at least.

Blog tags
I've finally got these things figured out. Will have to go back over old posts and revise some of them. Hurrah!

Friends Coming To Visit
I've actually got some friends putting together plans for coming up here over the next few months. Neil's trying to organise something, while my old friend Claire and her husband James have confirmed a date but haven't booked their flights yet.

Can I be any more excited about this? Not really. I've got about three weeks holiday still to take at some point, so I've got loads spare for any visitors. Although I might need to use some of it to tidy up the office, which isn't looking too great just now.

A week off comes to an end

Been trying to enjoy a week off work this week. I'm not sure that "enjoy" has really been the right word to use. For one thing I've spent most of the week answering the phone for Lorraine. Even my parents called and said, "We weren't calling to speak to you, we were looking for Lorraine." Charming!

Tried to relax where possible. I've taken Cookie on a few walks. Had to drop the car off at the village garage tonight and walk home in the rain. Law in the soaking wet - that brings back some memories (not anything to write home about, just privately funny).

Anyway, my week off is nearly over. Back to the grindstone again, wondering what I'm going back to.