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I should have been paying bills today. Ground rent, the AA, station car park, ISDN line, cable TV, broadband, electric bill. Ugh. They are sitting on the desk beside me. Instead, though, I’ve finally formatted the hard drive on my main PC and started again from scratch.

It’s always a scary moment when you finally commmit to it and realise that if there’s anything you’ve forgotten to back up it’s now gone. All seems to have worked OK, though. I now have a nice clean Windows XP that loads far quicker than the old one ever used to.

I’ve dumped Microsoft Office in exchange for StarOffice 6.0, zapped Outlook in favour of Mozilla mail, and taken the accompanying browser in place of Internet Explorer. I’ve got rid of AIM and Microsoft Messenger and combined by contact lists in Trillian, and Winamp, rather than Windows Media Player is now my default music playback app.

My network is working properly, too. It was always a little dodgy before, so I’m smiley and happy now.

I guess with all of these changes I should really have tried to go the whole hog and drop Windows entirely in favour of Linux, but I need Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and I still haven’t found anything to rival them in the Open Source arena. Perhaps I should look at upgrading my Mac (or buy a new one) and see if I can run my life on OSX instead.

Hmmm…

Weatherwise, it’s been another fab day. Summer would appear to be back, although for how long I don’t know. I’ve been to two garden centres, in spite of the fact that I have no garden, to look for birthday presents for other people and felt very relaxed strolling around slowly among the plants. It’s very therapeutic, and as a flat dweller the closest you get to having a garden - with the added bonus of avoiding the hard work it entails.

I need to sort out some travel insurance for July. I’m pretty sure European cover takes in Iceland, but I’m not sure whether Latvia, the likely destination of week two, is included, so perhaps worldwide cover would be better.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 16th, 2002 at 7:33 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.