The accommodation office seem to have taken my plea for help seriously and have asked me to meet them at lunch tomorrow for a "chat". Hopefully this will see a resolution to or at least ease my current cash problems. It will mean moving into halls unfortunately, which is less than desirable, but beggers can't be choosers. And I most certainly am a begger right now.

Currently I am resizing hundreds (yes literally, hundreds) of pictures into thumbnails and putting a pretty black border around each of them. Then cropping the originals down to a sensible size and putting captions under them, then grouping them together into albums, naming each album and making sure it appears under the correct year on the website. Fun fun fun.

In other news, tomorrow is April Fool's day. I'm just waiting for the deluge of bollocks that inevitably appears in the news at this time of year, and the emails that make claims such as

Yes. Dihydrogen Monoxide most certainly is the major component of acid rain. 2 hydrogen molecules with one oxygen molecule ... you guessed it, H2O - water. *Sigh*

Right home again for a shower, change of clothes and then walking back to Llanbadarn for free food and wine. Bonza!

http://thingsmygirlfriendandihavearguedabout.com/

HAHA! What a crazy website. I particularly like the mouseover on the picture in the top left. The question is, if he hates his girlfriend so much then why is he still with her? Another great blogsite:

http://www.myboyfriendisatwat.com/

All of these are coutesy of the Orkut blogging community forum.

Oh my god Carling is shit. Bought some a week or two ago for an event that never really happened. Only reason I bought Carling was because it was cheap and it was in Spar. Because I was skint at the time I had to buy it on my credit card, so I needed a store that sold beer and accepted credit card transactions. And I got IDed for it too. Now, because my cheapo Lidl's "Fink Brau" has ran out I thought I'd drink the Carling.

The stuff is disgusting. I can't believe I used to willingly drink this stuff in bars. "A pint of Carling, please mate" I'd say and then happily drink my pint of battery acid.

I just got a phonecall from a with-held number. I didn't answer it. People using with-held numbers who ring at this ridiculously early hour of the day do not bear good news.

Worryingly somebody is sending positive feedback from the old Open Learning Unit webpage. They're remark is along the lines of "this website is very easy to navigate". The worry here is that the new website is totally different in terms of navigation, and I'm worried it might upset the people who are used to the old site.

As you've probably all heard Ireland have finally made their move and banned smoking in pubs. Excellent news I'm sure you'll agree (unless you happen to smoke, in which case it may be an inconvenience to you when you begin to feel the withdrawl symptoms while assaulting your body with a cocktail of other liquid drugs) but, would you believe, there is an association calling for an immediate reversal of this law? FOREST is a pro-smoking organisation. Yes, they actually think smoking is a good thing.

http://www.forestonline.org/

Unbelievable. Quite unbelievable.

Woo! I have a new keyboard. Or rather an old keyboard. It's the same as the one I use at work, a nice solidly built dan keyboard. The keys offer a reasonably good positive tactile response, are high and prominent and don't offer too much or too little resistance.

The keyboard in question has been sitting in the room I work in since I got there back in September, and was probably there a long time before I arrived. On the way out of the office today I noticed it, and realised it was the same as the keyboard on my work machine...which I really like. So I checked it was ok with my boss, and then nabbed it. Now I have a keyboard that is actually a pleasure to use, and that has a working "c" key. :)

In response to my letter to the Student Financial Office for help with my worsening cash crisis:

What is that it? I asked for advice. I asked various questions and all they do is say "come in and fill out some paperwork so that I don't have to deal with you". I'm sick of the financial office. According to the Student Financial Support homepage:

How come every time I go in there, then, all they do is say "Here's the form - go away and fill it out. Then come back during our hugely restricted opening times"? Every time I've gone in there I've wanted advice. Not paperwork thrown at me, plain simple advice. Every time I've filled out one of those forms they simply put it in their little box and tell me I will be notified by post. I then get a letter two weeks later telling me whether or not they are prepared to give me money.

The email I sent them last night asked a number of specific questions and not so much as one was answered, nor was any offer of an appointment made, nor was I pointed to any sources of advice. All I get is fobbed off and I'm sick of it.

I've switched from Outlook Express at work to using Mozilla Thunderbird. The reason behind this was a simple one: I was sick of Outlook Express marking emails as read and then arbitrarily marking them as unread at random intervals. Even emails that had been on the system for days would suddenly pop up as unread every now and again.

So I've swapped and I'll never go back! Thunderbird is a lovely mail client, it has a nice clean user interface and sports a whole host of nice features. Best of all, once an email is read it stays read.

Internet Scum

My god there's some scum on the Internet. While I've been testing my CGI scripts I've been watching my Apache logs live so I can see errors as they happen. The number of people requesting my homepage and getting errors (because I don't have one) is unbelievable. It's not like my website is linked from anywhere... But then worse still some cheeky git tries to exploit a whole bunch of known IIS exploits on my box. This, of course, made one hell of a lot of noise in the logs.

I should say right now that I operate zero tolerance against script kiddies who directly try to hack me.

So out came Nmap. Little success there, they seemed to have a neatly locked down machine. So instead I decided to focus on dealing with a higer entity - their ISP. I found their ISP, got their email address for the people who control that DNS name, the email address of the person at the ISP responsible for DNS problems and also went and found their support email address.

So I copied the relevant parts of my logs into an email and sent it to all 3 addresses, requesting that they "take remedial actions" by which I meant "disconnect the fucking wanker". Heheheh. That'll learn 'em.

This weekend has been...odd. While I was invited to the beer festival that Liz is currently enjoying as I write this, I decided I simply couldn't justify the expense when I'm in so much trouble with money.

It's been odd having a full weekend to myself. Not really known what to do - I've mainly just been geek-overloading on the computer writing CGI scripts. Last night I realised I didn't have to be up early to do anything and still had another day to fill. This morning I went into work mode and started rushing to make my breakfast, drink my tea and simultanesously get things ready for work before I suddenly realised I didn't have work today.

Then there was a little confusion when I started talking to the Llamasofties and they greeted me with "good afternoon". A quick check of my watch told me it was 11:10am and so I was a little confused. A little later it dawned on me that the clocks went forward an hour last night.

So now I am rattling around in my flat looking for things to keep my brain ticking over until tomorrow when I will almost certainly be given some additional vast task to do on the website at work.

Oh fuck it I can't do this anymore.

I can't afford this flat, this course, my car insurance, the petrol, access to the Internet, my landline, my mobile, my overdraft or my credit card.

I can't move flats as I don't have enough money for a deposit. I can't cancel my car insurance or change insurers because I can't afford to pay off the outstanding sum of money. I can't pay off my credit card because the interest has mounted up so much that I can't afford it. I can't get rid of the car because my Mum will go mental if I do, and even then I can't afford to get rid of the car because train tickets to Newbury and back are £40 with a railcard.

I'm stuck in a low paying job in an expensive flat, suffering vast car insurance premiums and credit card repayments on a maxed-out overdraft with no way of getting myself out of all this shit.