I am really plaesed with the Nokia 6600, it works really well as a simple phone (obviously an important point!). In the "simple but effective" mould is the ability to switch it to handsfree and back again, and being able to re-order the icons in the main menu.
The camera is quite effective (Given reasonable level of light), the video really does seem to be lacking and I don't think I will be getting much use out of that feature. I can now recieve e-mail, access web pages and send Photo messages from the phone. I have it happily syncronising with Outlook 2003 on my Laptop via InfraRed, and will experiment soon with Blue tooth on my main PC.

The heater is burning quietly in the greenhouse, checked the temperature every morning this week - somewhere between 0C and 1C, not bad when it was -3C outside!

I have converted my old 8310 into a Pay-as-you-Go phone, and that is now in Amy's control.

Hurrrrahhhhhhhhh! I finally have my Nokia 6600... Phoned Nokia again this morning, and the young man I spoke to sounded as fed up as me with the constant lack of stock. He did howevere, advise trying one of the Orange shops in town, seems thay are a seperate part of the business and they DO have some stocks.

I took a brisk walk into Newstreet at lunchtime, and 30 minutes later emerged with my new toy. I now need to wait for them to swap the numbers so I can start using it properly. The camera seems to be quite good, and the IR link works to my business laptop. I will have a play with bluetooth, and if it works as advertised, I'll get a dongle for my home PC.

Washed the greenhouse, and put everything back... so now we are ready for this weeks frosts...

Well, its been a quiet week... Solved the problem of spoolsv.exe on SP2 (There was a hotfix!) and everything except a couple of Shockwave games (Polar Bowler and Blasterball).

Have given the greenhouse a fumigation today, in an attempt to destroy the mildew fungus that has killed several plants, and reduced most of my geranium cuttings to near death! I also finally got round to getting a heater - well we are almost at the start of winter (March!)

I am slightly annoyed with Orange - The website now lists the Nokia 6600 as available, but calling the phonesales people gave the answer - Not in stock yet! It seems that the web and call-centre are seperate parts of the business! As the website does not list the 6600 as available for upgrade yet, I can't do anything but wait a bit longer yet! Bugger!

That was a long weekend, I was at work on Saturday (8 hours) and Sunday (12 hours) - and I was exhausted by the time I got home.
I now have Monday and Tuesday off to relax, but as the kids are off school (half term), it may not be too relaxing!

I have played Joss Stone about 10 times now, and I am loving it.... If you havn't heard it, you really should.

I installed Windows XP SP2 on Friday - I was accepted into the Beta trial, it took a long time to download (222 MBytes) and the feed was quite slow at the server end - 20 KBytes per second. It then took about 3 hours to install it, tidy up the HDD, Back it up, Defrag it and finally install SP2 (That took almost 1 hour!)

No major dramas so far, but I do have a problem starting Photoshop 7, it hangs unless I kill spoolsv.exe!

OK, my new headphones have turned up today, they are VERY well made, VERY comfortable and VERY nice sounding. How effective they are at noise reduction, I am not too sure - it's very quite in here at the moment... :-)

I had a text message from Orange - still out of stock of the Nokia 6600 :-(

I have been invited to take part in the Windows XP SP2 Beta trials, I shall be downloading that soon, I hope.

Finally for today, I got "The Soul Sessions" by Joss Stone on CD - Excellent, go buy it now...! It's less than £9 - delivered!... And it was a most excellent way to test my new headphones!

I downloaded Firefox on Monday, it's the latest 'Browser ONLY' from mozilla - it does seem to be very quick, but it is a bit slow to load up. Frustratingly, it displays my CSS pages completely differently to IE 6 - neither of them get it right, they just get different bits wrong!

It's been a long week, but the weekend strats here... I have Sunday and Monday off.

It was the last performance of the Panto yesterday, I went last night with Arthur & Margaret (From Stoke), Stuart & Vanessa (From Wokingham) and Alex. The show was really very good. Yes, there was a lot of fluffed lines, and as it was the last show - the backstage crew were playing a few tricks on the cast but it was very funny.

The climax of the show was when James (Baron Hardup) actually went down on one knee and proposed - For Real - to Naomi (Prince Rupert) in front of the entire audience... Luckily, she said yes - and there was hardly a dry eye in the house. Congratulations and good luck to both of you...

ON a different topic altogether, I have completely failed to find the Voyager 1010 driver CD, so I asked BT's Voyager support - Ther will post me a replacement CD, Nice one guys!

Well I am really ticked off now... Just spent another hour or so on Amy's PC...

Still struggling to keep the Wireless network connection up, I think it must be the driver for the Voyager 1010 usb dongle network card thingy... I can't find the original CD that came with it..

I then made the BIG mistake of allowing BT Yahoo! to install the Parental Control software... what a pile of crud! I am going to have to wipe the PC and start again from scratch, but not before I have had a REALLY good look for the original Drivers disc that came with the 1010. It's going to be at least next Monday before that happens!

On the plus side, I have now been consistentlt below 13 stone (82 KG) for a week now... That's almost 1 stone lost since I rejoined the Gym in October...

Still no joy on the Nokia 6600 front... have spoken to Orange again tonight, and it seems that there is a problem with the software and they are not due in stock untill next week at the earliest! Bugger!

Ah well, at least there is my headphones to look forwards to.

Last night, i started loading Amy's PC from scrath with her own copy of Windows XP Pro. So far so good, but still a lot of work to do before I let her loose on the internet again....