Had a bit of a heart stopping moment last night. Silly me managed to pull the plug on my laptop while it was running without a battery. Laptop didn\'t like said power outage. Laptop decided to sulk. Big time. I was unable to boot into windows, safe mode, or any other option the handy f8 menu presents you with. The problem was eventually tracked down and the solution found (recovery console, chkdsk /r, if you\'re interested) but it took a further 1 1/2 hours to fix, 90 minutes of praying that it could be fixed. The following 2 hours were spent backing up said laptop, something I should do on a regular occasion but never seem to get around to. Lesson learned, I will be implementing a proper backup routine from now on. The greatest moment out of all of that was reading on the microsoft site \"this behavio[u]r is by design\", well thank you very much but that\'s the kind of design I could really do without!

Tonights problem has been windows media player which appears to have been stuffed up by winamp. Are you sensing a theme? hmm. It\'s just been rolled back to a previous version and is telling me it wishes to reboot. It can wait. Especially since the windows (that theme again) service pack to has handily increased my reboot time to near enough 5 minutes! I\'ve been playing with streaming again this weekend. After looking into and installing multiple servers in an attempt to get something feasible working it turns out I needed nothing more than apache and an ability to list file locations in an m3u file. Sorted. If media player was playing ball I would be happily listening to bing crosby at the moment (I\'m in christmas mode). The fact that I have the files stored locally and could quite easily play them without apache is irrelevant

Work has brought with it much to do and little time to do it in, fun stuff though. I hadn\'t realised it was children in need next week, that\'s come around quick. The shout is moving along at an alarming pace and bits and bobs are bringing christmas ever closer... cool

Talking of cool, what\'s with the weather? Snow soon perhaps, brrrr