My laptop died again. Windows decided it would stop working, so I reinstalled it... And then the computer wouldn't work at all, so I had to reformat the hard disk and do a clean install of Windows. I've lost a lot of programs, but I have backups... I hope that I can get everything back, but right now all I've got is a yucky default XP blue desktop and the stupid default programs that came with the computer when I got it. Still got my Firefox and its related themes, extensions, cookies and bookmarks though - I backed up my profile onto a CD this morning and restored it. Yay! I think I'd be lost without all my extensions, I have a lot of them and I don't think I'd have remembered all of them for re-downloading.

Anyway, I've been trying to get this thing back in working order for around 6 hours now, and it's showing no signs of being done yet. I'm going to get Windows patched up and up-to-date (my recovery CD only has XP SP1) then I'm going to restore a backup of my registry. Hopefully that will mean I'll get all my programs back, because I don't have any of the original setup disks for them any more. *Sigh*

Windows sucks. This is the second time in 18 months that I've had to reformat/reinstall, and this came after my laptop practically died for good. I fear this may be the beginning of the end with this computer... It's 3 years old now and its warranty runs out next month. I have no money so I won't be getting a new one, so I just hope it doesn't die completely.

Edit: Still here, at half past 2 in the morning. The computer died again when I tried to restore parts of the registry. I've now lost 100MB worth of photos. I had backed them up onto a CD-ROM but upon looking at the CD, the files have somehow been replaced with a blank folder. I know I backed them up, I remember doing it. I just don't know why they're not where I thought they were. Anyway, that's sad, but it could have been worse. At least I've still got the script I was in the middle of writing and the new version of PHPAskIt which I was meant to be releasing last month. *Sigh*

How on earth is it already August?! Where is the time going? Noooo

My internet is slow. Either that or all the sites I'm trying to visit are slow. One or two of them work, the rest don't. Blah.

The heatwave has died down at last, though I sort of wish it hadn't... It's been replaced with the usual summer weather for this country - rain, more rain, yet more rain and temperatures not quite making it into the 20°C (about 60°F? Not sure) region. That still doesn't stop our bedroom from being really hot and humid (even with the window open) and therefore stopping me from sleeping. Like now, it's 5:15am and I should probably not be on my computer at this time.

Anyway. I'm working on a custom blog/content management script. I'm really pleased with it so far, although the functionality kind of resembles WP in many ways so I'm not sure there'll be much point to it other than the fact that it's teaching me a lot in terms of PHP and stuff. So far I have posting (drafts, private entries, password protected entries), commenting, comment moderation and fancy URLs that don't rely on mod_rewrite. :D Yay! I don't have an admin panel yet, so that's the next step. It gets a bit annoying having to login to phpMyAdmin every time I want to approve some of my testers' comments, or edit/delete an entry/comment :P The script is completely written by me, but it borrows 3 functions from WP - mostly formatting stuff because I can't do regular expressions. Those functions are the 'safe' title generator, the entities converter for posts, and the nl2p function. I'm sure I'll eventually be able to "get" regexes and be able to rewrite all that myself (I really need to rewrite it all - WP's functions mess up my stuff by changing absolutely EVERYTHING into alternative entities...), but for now I'm going to use WP's until I get the rest of the script done. And no, I haven't been using the Build A Blog tutorial series, or indeed any tutorial series. This work is (mostly) all miiiiine. Heh.