I always take my camera everywhere - even on mundane trips like the journey to work - which makes it so annoying that I forgot to take it to Sal and Dan’s engagement party last night. It must be the first time in months that I’ve walked out the front door without it.

Anyhow, We all zizzed there in separate cars. Mun and Andrew were heading down with Viv and a back seat full of food, most of which didn’t get eaten, and Dad, having arrived yesterday afternoon on a plane from France, was staying at Sal’s, braving the cat hairs with his allergy.

We all turned up at pretty much the same time, and things were already in full swing, with the pub full and a DJ, who looked disconcertingly like Fr Ted and was clearly a failed club singer, playing music that would have been loud enough to drown out jumbo jets on final approach for Heathrow.

I think I was a bit under-dressed, actually, in the jeans and jumped I’d worn for work yesterday. Everyone else was in shirts (if not shirts and ties) and there was even a smattering of suit-wearing going on, which is certainly not called for on a weekend.

Anyhow, Sal was very busy flitting around keeping everyone entertained, but knowing most of her friends anyway there were plenty of people to talk to - including Sue, who was apparently very taken by the Sue mosaic I’d botched after Sal’s birthday back in November. I promised to make her a better one and get it printed, but started fiddling on it today and then got distracted with some writing that needed to be done.

The night zoomed by, with the DJ alternately filling and then emptying the floor with his choice of music. It was one of those very mixed parties where Dexy’s Midnight Runners could have everyone on their feet, and Darude emptied the place with the ferocity of a well-aimed fart.

It all wound down fairly promptly at half eleven, and by midnight we were out on the streets, heading home through the lashing rain. It was almost impossible to see out through the windscreen at times, with the wind gusting and the spray splashing up.

After that, a warm duvet was very welcome indeed.

Crap presents being touted for Valentines day:

1. Bunch of long-stemmed red Noses

2. Heart-shaped red pan (even if it is Le Creuset)

It’s not important why, but I’ve spent most of the afternoon (having washed all the windows, sent extended replies to all the flagged messages in my inbox and hoovered the flat in an attempt to put off work for as long as possible) playing with a variety of blogging software.

What I can’t understand, having tried four, is why Blogger even gets a look in. I know it’s free, it’s easy to use and it was one of the first on the market, but the interface is so clunky and brash that it’s just… ugh.

Movable Type remains my favourite, in spite of the fiddly setup process, and Grey Matter, while I’ve not used it in a while, remains a bit of a favourite purely because of its simplicity, and the fact that it’s entirely open source.

Of the remotely hosted ones, though, TypePad is excellent. It looks great, it’s set up in a moment, it’s flexible, and it allows you to post using email, which is almost as simple as posting to MindSay using AIM.

It was all work-related. I wouldn’t do that kind of thing for fun, which being as today’s a Saturday is of course why I did so much putting off and putting off.

Still, the flat looks good as a result. There’s nothing like work for making you do a spring-clean.

I hated school. Of course, looking back on it, it’s with a certain fondness, but if I’m honest, at the time, I didn’t enjoy it, and I used to think that the ex-pupils who’d made it as MPs or sportsmen (all boys’ school) or writers or something successful then came back and lectured us on how important it was to get a good start in life were self-serving cretins. I always vowed that if I was invited back to do the same I’d accept, and use it as a platform to slate the place.

I’m glad to say I’ve mellowed considerably since then, but that didn’t stop me pausing for thought when I received an email yesterday morning from my old business studies teacher asking if I’d give a presentation at the back end of March.

I’m not particularly inclined to do it. I was hoping to go away at the end of March, but it’s already starting to look busy with everyone booking off time around then. Even so, if I’m in London I’m not sure I’d have much worth saying on a ‘business and IT’ topic. It’s very broad.

So, at the moment the email is sitting in my inbox with an action flag beside it while I have a think. Quite apart from anything else, I wasn’t a well behaved pupil, and it’s going to feel strange calling a teacher ‘John’ rather than tugging at a forelock and explaining my actions.

Meanwhile, I’ve fallen in love with the sound of Venus Hum. I came across them quite by chance, the previous owner of my Mac in the office having left a copy of their album on the hard drive. I’d been studiously ignoring it for the last four months, but… what a mistake.

I listened to the album from front to back three times in a row, then dug it out on Amazon only to find it is copy protected, which isn’t much good if you want to put it on an iPod. The only copy they had in Virgin was the same, so I ended up dropping it back onto the shelf.

It makes a complete mockery of this whole anti-music piracy thing, though. I wanted to buy the album because I liked the MP3s, but because it won’t let me make copies of it to play on my portable device, I’d rather not buy it. So much for MP3s killing the music industry.

Ho-hum.

I also - finally - got around to upgrading to OS X 10.3, which truly puts Windows to shame. In fact, it puts 10.2 to shame, and even that was pretty good. It actually makes connecting the iBook to my Windows network easier than connecting a third Windows PC, which is a pretty shameful state of affairs. Only trouble is, with all the ‘improvements’ I’m losing track of my keyboard shortcuts, some of which seem to have changed for no good reason.

I’m still not entirely sold on Expose, but what I do like, and discovered entirely by accident, was that by holding down the scroll wheel of a Microsoft mouse and turning it either backwards or forwards you can cycle through your open applications. If they implemented that in Windows it would be a great time saver.

Cycling through open applications using the mouse scroll wheel

This very cool web site turns out to be a well disguised campaign for the anti-smoking lobby. Fantastic design, very amusing, some great merchandise, and a very subtle way of luring you in. Top marks, if a little underhand.

It’s almost as impressive as these mobile phone handsets modeled on old bakelite telephones from the 1950s. Totally impractical, but they just look so good I want one.

They’re selling on eBay for around

A few tweaks have been going on behind the scenes here at nik.co.uk to make things run a little faster. All seems to be working fine still, so I guess it was successful.

The most immediate difference is the loss of the ‘related entries’ section at the end of each post. Compiling these by trawling through an SQL database of over 1100 records each time a new post is made was slowing everything down. Hopefully this should mean posting comments is not so painfully tedious as it used to be.

Less evident is a web cam running in the background and updating every ten minutes. Assuming all goes well, I’ll probably sneak it into the interface somewhere discrete, although at the moment it’s showing nothing more exciting than the Chelmsford weather.

Finally, a brand new toy for anyone running iChat or AOL Instant Messenger. Add the screen name notreallynik to your Buddy list and have a chat. It’s a snazzy bit of AI running on an antiquated machine under a desk at home, but it seems to work well enough. Only trouble is, as it’ll learn more the longer it runs, it’s not the brightest spark just now.

Test him out and let me know what you think (all sessions are logged).

Quote of the day must go to Justin Timberlake, who coined the phrase ‘wardrobe malfunction‘ after tearing off part of Janet Jackson’s top during the half-time show of the Superbowl last night. Just what was she wearing underneath, though? I guess that’s what Americans call pasties (as distinct from pasty or indeed the Parisian grog, Pastis).

(As an aside, that definition links to the apparently technical term, ‘tits on a keyboard‘, which I must try and use in an editorial sometime soon.)

CBS cut away as soon as it happened. But what would we have seen if it hadn’t? (It’s Shockwave - move your mouse around).

Achievement of the day was getting out of bed while it was still cold and dark outside, and swimming before heading off for work. It made me feel less guilty about…

Dish of the day, the vegetarian burger at the Eagle Bar Diner, the second-best meat-free burger in the city (after Mildreds). Eagle turns out to be the perfect place for impromptu working lunches as you can shuffle into a booth and be unmolested by the rest of the world.

Telly of the day: Groundhog Day on Channel Five. Still surprisingly watchable in an eminently throwaway manner, which perhaps explains why I threw away the last hour of it … temporarily … and stuck it on video. Still, it was a snazzy bit of scheduling from Five, being set on 2nd February, again and again and again and again.

So what is proper Orkut etiquette? The whole idea is that you link your friends together and so that they can find one another, chat to other people who have things in common and - essentially - ask favours of them because there is a vague vague vague link between them.

It’s kind of like an online version of the Masons.

So, what do I do with this evening’s request from another Rawlinson to link our profiles?

Sure, we have a couple of common interests. He’s into Apple computers, has joined an Amelie community, is a blogger… but his profile tells me nothing other than the facts he’s in a committed relationship and lives in Canada. We don’t even seem to have any friends in common, so I’m guessing he found me by searching on my name, rather than by clicking through someone we both know.

Wouldn’t accepting the link negate the whole purpose of a social network? If I don’t actually know him then the whole thing falls down. Friendship is, after all, more than sharing a surname, and that definition highlights the key weak point of social networking tools like Orkut: they are at the mercy of their users. If Orkut members don’t take Orkut seriously then it will, ultimately, be nothing more than an online directory of names and stats.

Or am I being an unfriendly, solitary sod?

Social networking is fraught with potential for social faux-pas.