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....

Quite a good day... Manchester United beat Southampton 3-2 in a very exciting and tense match, we actually arrived early enough to have something to eat and drink before the game started, and Saha scored on his debut...

I have decided to get another pair of headphones, and have taken the plunge bigtime : A pair of Bose Noise Cancelling headphones - A snip at onlt £275... Gulp... Ah well you can't take it with you... I suppose the DVD recorder will have to wait till later in the year now, perhaps my Xmas present?

Not too sure about Rubens album, a bit too much "Hip Hop" and not enough "Soul" for my taste... Can't win them all...

Good things come to those who wait... I finally have my 1 MByte ADSL connection, I have got my bike back home, I am going to Old Trafford tommorow to watch United play Southampton, and Opening night (MK II) went off without a hitch last night (Although the audience was only about 60% complete)

Amanda managed "Front of House" without incident and a reasonable profit was still made, in spite of the limited number of punters.

Remember I said my legs were killing me yesterday - I was wrong, that was just pain : Today they are killing me! And Finally I managed to write my first working application in VB.Net 2003. A simple One arm bandit type of game, but it worked, and it seemed quite straight forwards.

last night, my music of choice was "Clay Aiken - The Measure of a Man". Clay was runner up in last years American Idol, and it really is rather a good album... sort of like a male Dido?

Tonight, it is "Ruben Studdard - Soulful". Ruben was the Winner of last years American Idol, I'll let you know how good it is (or not) later...

The Good News : Opening night for "Cinderella" was not infront of an half filled theatre.
The Bad News : The show got cancelled, a total of 7 people turned up, audience, cast, crew combined... Tickets will be valid for next Wednesday instead.

I took the bus into work this morning...
The Good News : My bike was still there this morning, and the roads were fairly clear
The Bad News : The battery was too flat to start the bike. I ended up calling the AA out, and within a few seconds of the jump leads being connected, the bike started.

I have left it at work tonight, the roads are clear, but as usual our estate is still a skating rink. I'll get the bus in again tommorow morning, and ride back...

I had another 3 miles or so of walking on icy pavements today - my legs are killing me tonight.

Oh My God!!! Less than 10 mm of snow this afternoon, and the whole of Birmingham, the Hagley Road and the M5 (North and southbound) is gridlocked.

I managed to get about 1.5 miles on the bike before all the slush started to freeze - and that took about 1.5 hours! I have had to leave the bike parked up in a side road and walk the rest of the way (4 miles) - I finally got home at 19:40, exhausted and wringing wet with sweat. It wouldn't be so bad, but I had 30 minutes on the cross trainer at lunchtime!

All I have to worry about now, is how do I get to work in the morning - Will I be able to get to work in the morning? - and how and when do I go to get my bike back! Will it even still be there!

It's Opening night for Phoenix Productions first panto "Cinderella", I hope they are not playing to a half empty house!

Flippin' Heck!! 45 minutes it just took to install VB.Net on my PC... And I still have to go through it all again on the laptop....

It comes with a "Getting Started" manual, a large number of class description Posters and 6 CD's - Yes 6!!!

There is a Windows 2000 SP 4 disk, a 'Prerequisites' disc, 3 MSDN Library CD's and finally the VB.net CD. This has now swallowed approximately 2 GB of my disc space... Good job I have plenty available!

Now all I need to do, is a) find time to go thro' it all again on the laptop, and b) even more time to sit down with the book and work out how to use it. The one thing that is immediately obvious, is, it is very different to VB6.

better put the laptop on charge, I think I need a full battery before I start!

Did a little more experimenting with CSS on the webpage yesterday. On the Holidays page, I have replaced the table construct with more CSS. It looks the same in the browser, but should allow future changes of layout and/or colour scheme to be done far more easily. It also renders very quickly, and the page is smaller...

Well one of my new "toys" has arrived in the post this morning - VB.net Standard (2003 edition). I don't have time to install it at the moment, I am off to the Gym in 1/2 hour... All I need now is for Orange to call me to change the phone!

I have finally sat down and spent a little time playing with the Website re-design. I am attempting to use a Dreamweaver template and a .CSS style sheet to handle most of the work, leaving me to just cut and paste the actual data from the old site to the new one.

I am not sure, at this stage, how effective it will be but it seems OK at the moment. You can see the "Work In progress" here

I have decided to avoid a Graphical interface altogether at present. There are two reasons behind this 1) I am interested to see what I can do without using graphics, and 2) There is enough to learn as it is, without the complication of graphics.

The biggest problem I have using graphics: The background colour... If I change the colour of the background at any time, it seems to require a HUGE amount of work to regenerate all the graphics to look correct.

I have noticed, just how quickly the fwe working pages load and render.. Do I really need graphical buttons.... Uhhhhhhmmmmmmm

Boy, that was a crap course!! I have been down in Maidenhead for the past two days on a "Call Pilot Networking" training course at Nortel. Most of the exercises failed, for all four groups of students...

On the plus side, I went to the cinema last night... Runaway Jury. It was pretty good, quite accurate to the book (at least as I remembered it, wasn't it a tabacco company in the book?)

And I have finally finished the "Dark Materials" trilogy on Audiobook. That's one good thing about a four hour round trip in the hire car!

Still no Visual Basic, no Nokia 6600.... Not Fair:::: I WANT MY TOYS!

Double Doh!!

As if having to wait for my new cell phone wasn't bad enough, I've had an e-mail today from Amazon... My VB.NET is out of stock and it will be another week to 10 days!

I also had a e-mail from BT confirming my order to upgrade to 1MB ADSL, but they have got the full price on it..... Lets hope I get that sorted out before they start billing me!

Not a good day from a "Boy's Toys" perspective!

Doh! Another text message from Orange - STILL no 6600 in stock... I am starting to sulk now!

On the plus side, I have just ordered an upgrade to 1MB ADSL connection, the upgrade is FREE, and BT are doing an Employee special offer rate of £33 per month (£41 for normal punters), as my curreny employee offer has expired that means I only need to pay an extra£5 per month to get double speed connection.....

Now if only I could get my new phone.....

It's been a bit of a busy week, one way and another... Work has started to pick up again after the xmas lull, and I have spent about 7 hours finishing the Program for the panto.

Did I ever mention that my daughter, Amy, in a drama group : Phoenix Productions? No, well she is... Amanda has got the post of 'Front of House manager' and is responsible for Program & refreshment sales, and I got volunteered with designing the program. My own fault, I was very critical of the standard of the last one, and when asked "could you do better" was daft enough to say YES!

Finally finished it yesterday morning, burnt two copies to CD (Publisher 2003 & PDF format) and handed them over to the producer. The show starts in just over 1 week, so it was a bit borderline. However when things like the running order are still being changed with only two weeks to go, what can you do?

I bought a copy of Publisher 2003 specifically for the job, and I have to say - It's excellent. The last time I tried this program was version 3, many years ago, and it was awful. So there you are, some MS software DOES get better in newer versions, and it not ALL feature bloat.

I have already started on the program for the summer show, which is not till June. I fully expect that it won't get finished untill the last moment again, but I can get the 'Look and Feel' approved, and the basics in place now - or at least as soon as the Panto is finished in a couple of weeks.

I have been impressed with the Laptop performance too, 2.5 hours continuous battery use still 40% left. I finished the battery off by playing MP3's for another hour, so 3 1/2 hours on a full charge would seem to be realistic... Not too shabby!

On Friday, I went to a lunchtime Bodypump class, different instructor to my morning classes : My God do I ache today... I don't think I have EVER worked so hard (physically) in my life....

No news on the Nokia 6600 front, or at least no good news: I had a text message from Orange on Thursday to say that they still have no stocks. At least they are keeping me informed... always have liked Orange customer service.

Today, I have been playing with the configuration on my Archos MP3 player. Running Rockbox firmware you can save multiple configuration files to allow you to easily change everything about the player for different uses. For Example: I now have a Walkman and an In_Car setup. The In_Car config, sets a lower volume level, flat equalisation, flips the screen up-side down, loads a larger font and a simplified 'While Playing Screen'.

In the process, I managed to overwrite my Walkman WPS configuration, so having spent about an hour recreating it, I have 'Cut & Pasted' both WPS files to my Website. At least I can't loose them again!

I downloaded a copy of "BBC BASIC for Windows" last week, boy what a trip down memory lane. That coupled with the work I have been doing on websites recently (Home & Work) has re-ignited my desire to do some programming. I have now ordered a copy of VB.Net 2003 from Amazon - £87, not too bad, and that should be here sometime this week. I want to make my own Playlist generator as my first project, and maybe a version 2 of my Rockbox configuration prog, it's been 12 months since I last worked on that....!

Ohhhh! :-(

Lady from Orange did phone me, as promised, but they are out of stock of the 6600....! She will call me back in "About a week" when they have some more in. Hope it's not too long, I want it for next Thursday; I am on a course in Maidenhead (Again) and want the toys to keep me occupied during the evening!

Talking of toys, I got a Cassette adaptor for my Archos over the weekend and tried it out yesterday... it works a treat. When I first put it in, the sound was all distorted and totally un-listenable. I then realised I had got the volume on the car stereo at only 2... Normally too quite to hear, I then tuned down the volume on the walkman from 85% to 65% and it worked fine. I have now saved a configuration called In-Car, and another called Walkman so I can quickly switch between the two settings. Man, I love this Rockbox firmware...