Time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana

An unexpectedly busy weekend, given that I was planning to work and spend as little as possible.

On Friday, I cycled up to Waterloo for a birthday drinkie with lushattic, who was accompanied by the real cardboardnewman. I left them after a couple of refreshing waters to head up to Kentish Town to meet David "armchairanalyst" Ulicsak and his young lady Claire and some friends including pilot_moondog. Then back home again under my own power, including a lap of Regent's Park when I took a wrong turn near Marylebone. Bugger. It's quite hard work, this fitness lark, but Mitcham to Waterloo in 50min and Kentish Town to Mitcham in 1h15m isn't too shabby.

Alas, I no longer own a recumbent - Clara does instead - and I didn't really fancy doing the London to Brighton on a Birdy. It was full up, anyway. So despite a possible crash at technofairy, I decided to do something else, instead.

So 5h after I got in from Camden, I was up bright and early on Saturday morning - no, really, I was up at 8am - me! - so that the the kind, generous and generally wonderful nolley could give me a lift up to Nottingham for ZZ9's annual Towel Picnic, which happened in Highfield Gardens, by the lake in the University grounds.

There, I sat on my (naturally all-black) towel and picnicked in the sunshine with my lovely the_major , Mr & Mrs aeglefinus , redbrown, alexmc, adelheid - and, I was glad to see, dougs, who was surprisingly well, considering. I gave him a hug. If you know me, that's a pretty rare event. My rare hugs are usually taken from me forcibly.

The highlight for me was a trip around Amazozo, a luminarium by Architects of Air. It really was amazingly good. Saying that it was vaguely like wandering around inside a bouncy castle while tripping would be to compare going for a paddle in Blackpool with surfing a big one at Maui. Really remarkable. I shall be spamming Flickr with many photos shortly.

Then off to the pub withdarth_tigger and tregenza, the latter of whom put us up for the night, too. Cheers, Chris. Blatant plug: if you or anyone you know has dyslexia or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, go read his dyslexia and ADHD news site.

Then back to London via the long-suffering Nolly to take the utterly screwed Underground to Ilford - three and a half sodding hours - to rebuild and reinstall coth's PC. That took 'til 4:30am but it's working sweetly now. Remember, kids, friends don't let friends use Windows. Gah.

And tonight, Clara has arrived in London once again, where I bemused her by taking her to her first ever ROUGOL meet. I don't think she made a lot of that. She's still asleep now, in fact.

But she's here - as is this post - to mark the fact that as of this weekend just finished, she and I have been going out for a whole year. It's incredible how fast it has gone, but then, it's been a wonderful year, and you know the proverb. Thank-you for everything, Clara, my darling. I love you!

Remember the "friends don't let friends" thing?

This is why.

Mark's list of wants and likes is radically unlike my own - indeed, I'd hate many of his preferences. However, the overall thrust is bang-on.

I set up coth with Windows 2000. It worked like a dream & I added in a load of FOSS or small-"f" free tools so that she would be able to play anything, view anything, read anything and edit most things.

But Brian uses XP. Work uses XP. The tech droid at work was such a marvel of technical sophistication that he was unable to set up a machine to make a VPN & RemoteDesktop connection into her office machine (username "initial+surname") from a home machine (username "First Name Surname"), could not follow the idea of "My Documents" not being under /Documents and Settings, struggled with Windows not being on C: and was a bit bemused by the whole notion of Windows 2000 itself.

So now, Caroline has XP, installed onto C, with a username of initial+surname. I hope this makes life easier.

How to install Windows XP in 5 hours or less

I spend a lot of my life installing Windows for people. Often, these people are friends of mine. I would really like to give them something less awful to use, but all things considered, I don't know any one OS which, considered in toto, sucks less. Maybe the fact that Evolution is coming to Windows might help to wean people off Office, for a start.