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After winning a packet of Haribo for having the “most informative Skype mood message” during a recent 9 month project (you can imagine how exciting the other awards were…) I decided that it would be a good idea to continue the practice of updating all-and-sundry with my current location, the weather and my upcoming plans. I also, while musing on this, happened to notice that Skype now supports “rich” mood messages – meaning that you can use basic HTML to add bold and the like. Finally, being a bit of an Excel fan and a follower of Alex Schultz’s blog, I wondered how easy it would be to speak to the Skype API from Excel VBA.

Continue reading…

Ah no, I’ve gotten to the point where not only am I blogging, I’m blogging about writing tools for blogging. Do not read on unless you’re particularly interested in WordPress and Countdowns. <sigh> Continue reading…

I went on a work trip to California in December 2006, and someone suggested on my way over that I could look into buying a Nintendo Wii.

“Pah,” I said, “what would I want with a games system anyway?”

A bit of research later, and I was intrigued… 10 shops which had sold out later, and I was HOOKED.  You learn a lot about yourself when things like this unfold.

So my weekends for the last couple of months have been dominated by streams of phone calls to Woolworths, HMVs and random games stores across London in the hope that somewhere had one in stock.  I found that the HMV near work had taken delivery of a couple at some point, and in what was approaching desperation resolved to pop in every day at lunchtime, just in case.

Of course, the only day I took off sick… they received 5 at once, so a very coughy and ill-advised (health-wise) dash along the District Line later I was the proud of a brand new Wii, complete with 2 games, an extra Wii-mote and a memory card.

I’ll be writing more about my thoughts later on this blog, but it’s safe to say that it is a really robust piece of design, and everyone who tried it over the weekend (20+ people) is now thinking about getting one themselves.

Nice one.

Ah bum.

I’ve been under the weather all week, taking half-days here and there, denying the obvious – now I’ve got extreme Man Flu piled up on top of me like something warm, heavy and quite smelly. Like I imagine a hippo to be.

It has somewhat scuppered my plans to go to Band tonight, so the pivotal role of 2nd Baritone Horn will go unfilled this week as we prepare for the areas on March the 18th.

Why is this interesting? Why is it on my blog?

Well, as anyone who has ever had it before can tell you, when you have Man Flu, it’s NEWS.

I wrote a post last year about this which gets picked up in Google quite often.  I realised the other week that the link I’d provided had died, so I’ve updated my original post, including a new link to the EyeToy PC drivers.