I appear to have had a birthday today... And with it, came a brand new shiny laptop! :D My four-year-old one was really starting to give up (especially the screen) so I thought it was about time it was replaced. I now have a Toshiba Equium Dual Core 1.73GHz/2GB RAM/120GB HDD/15.4" widescreen/Windows Vista laptop. Its brightness makes me realise just how bad the screen from the last one was getting... I had both laptops on next to each other and it seemed like the old one wasn't even on.

I also got a digital photoframe from the boyfriend :D It's brilliant! You put in a memory card and it'll do a slideshow of the pictures. It'll also do alarm clocks and stuff but I'm not really interested in that... The fact that I can have a picture frame that changes its photo whenever I want (it even has a remote control for that XD ) is enough to keep me entertained for ages :D :D :D

Anyway, back to the laptop... Ooooooooh it's nice. The fact that it goes higher than 1024×768 is great - my photos fit on my screen now :P But like I said, it has Windows Vista on it. URGH. If I had an XP disk I'd install that on there - Vista is really quite rubbish. Ok so it looks shiny, but I can't find anything in it and most stuff that was simple in XP and prior is stupidly difficult in Vista. GAH. The fact that I can't change the colour of the taskbar is very annoying, as is the lack of themes and customisations. I don't want a black taskbar, I don't want weird blue-ish/transparent windows with huge borders, I want my own theme kthx. >:(

Apart from that, it's wonderful and I love it lots. <3<3<3<3 :D

So here's a new layout.

It's not the one I was originally going to use, but I like this one better. Ok so it's purple/blue/white again but I can't seem to work with any other colours. Grrr.

Thanks to Jem for the flower photo (and yes, they're meant to look like that! They were awkward in shape, it's not that I cut them out wrong :P )

Um, yeah. Some things don't work, I'll fix those at some point. If you find any bugs, let me know. I've tested this in IE6/7, FF, Konqueror and Opera, but I don't have any other browsers. I was going to try and get to a Mac today to try in Safari but that didn't happen so meh.

Happy (50th!) birthday Mum! Ahaha, she won't like me giving her age away but oh well :P

Well, after initially starting off rather badly, my birthday went quite well. I got a lovely new camera (Nikon Coolpix 5600) and a few other necessities for the new house/flat thing (I say that since we can't decide if it's a flat or a house - it's tiny small but has a first floor). Yay for us - we're moving in in two weeks! Eeeeep, I can't wait!

Speaking of our new place, does anyone know how to activate a phone line? We need internet in our place (need! NEED!!!!) and the landlord won't do it for us, which is fair enough, but I would have expected him to activate the phone line for us. We can put the net in afterwards (no dial-up for us - broadband it will be), but I really wish we didn't have to wait around for it once we're there. Ack, net withdrawl... *twitches*

A couple of other things I thought I'd mention (not interested? Too bad :P )... Firefox is really annoying me lately. It keeps encountering errors and "needs to close" so I lose all my session cookies and end up losing where I was on forums and such, as well as the 3842739583 tabs I have open. It's not my computer, I defragged it, got rid of spyware/adware/viruses but yet FF still finds cause for making stupid errors. Plus, my Gmail notifier add-on is stuck on 2 new messages, when I know there are no more. *Beats it*

Also: Katrina. You cannot read/see/hear about anything else right now. I have read and heard several opinions on the aftermath, but there is one thing that really angered me.
I was watching a news report on the situation in New Orleans and the (American) reporter ended with "But this isn't Iraq, Somalia or Ethiopia... this is home. It shouldn't be happening here."
Why did this anger me? Because he was implying that it's alright for people to live in those conditions in Iraq, Somalia and other such countries, which I think is totally unacceptable.

That's my opinion anyway.