Yeah, I know I haven't blogged for ages. Not really had anything interesting to write about...

I passed my driving test last week though (at last!) and can now drive the boyfriend's car. This would be great if he didn't have it 99.9% of the time, but other than that, I'm not complaining... Much.

I have so much work to do for my university course. The term is cut in half since we're on placement from April onwards, so they're squashing everything into the first six weeks. In those 6 weeks, I have to:

1. Learn Flash
2. Make a full featured flash site with:
   • Streaming audio
   • MP3 playback feature
   • Interactive content
   • Absolutely NO HTML whatsoever
3. Write an essay about said Flash site
4. Research a relevent media study (must not be the same as anyone else; there are 200+ students though!) and write a 1500 word report on it that must be presented in two weeks (EEK)
5. Choose my dissertation title and write draft of said dissertation (first 1500 words of 12000)

Help?

Oh and Wordpress has messed up a lot of my pages since the upgrade to 2.0.1, as well as setting my commenting to registered users only. I didn't notice since I'm always logged in, but I saw yesterday that the box was checked in the admin panel. Hmph. Should be back to normal now.
If you notice any more weird 404s or other random errors, please let me know. *Beats WP*

Yesterday the contact forms on my design site were spammed 30 times in the space of half an hour. *Tears hair out* For now, I've put up NL-PHPMail which I've been updating for CG but apprently the captcha still doesn't stop the spammers. Grrrr. I don't know how to use the PHP GD libraries to make complicated images, but if anyone else can then feel free to tell me how...
The stupid thing is that all 30 of these spams only contained a random American city in the URL field. There were no comments whatsoever, no links, no advertising enlargement/medical products, nothing. All there was (apart from a random name and email address that seemed to end in either Green, Miller or Scott) was the city. So I get all these forms filling up my inbox and all they say is "Boston", "NY", "Miami" and other similar cities... Is that pointless or what? There wasn't even any point to it since they weren't trying to sell me a product or increase their Google pagerank or anything. Gah.

Right so I'm back "home" (at my parents') for a week. Rather bored. Got yet another attempt at The Driving Test on Monday, not confident about it but we'll see how it goes.

Oh further to my last post on IE7, I discovered that apart from its CSS being slightly more advanced, it's still as rubbish as IE6 - it still doesn't display <acronym> tags properly and has a huge amount of other errors that I can't be bothered to mention. Oh but it has tabbed browsing and RSS subscription functionality! *Gasp* Wow! /sarcasm
I can see it now - all the n00bs will get confused and say "lyke omg I prefered IE6!!!1" - I know a few people who've already said that to me, haha.

Edit: It's not stopping! Even though I changed the forms and everything - the spam continues! Turns out I'm having to delete the form from the server completely. Dammit. I had renamed it in the hope of being able to work on it later, but apparently that's not good enough. Now I'm getting a ton of 404 error reports on my site for spammers looking for any sort of form script to abuse. They haven't found NL-PHPMail yet though. I hope the image verification will be enough to keep them away from it.
The amount of email spam I get is absolutely ridiculous. I don't need form spam making it worse, thanks.

So, I'm back "home" at my parents'. Have been since last week when I spectacularly failed my driving test for the third time and stayed over Christmas. My internet time here is limited which is why I haven't been frequenting forums/replying to comments/blah blah as often as I normally do, not that anyone really noticed :P

Am I weird because I like setting up peoples' computers for them? My Aunt just bought a brand new laptop (*wants it! Wants it!* Mobile/wireless technology, yes please!!! *Drool*) and I delighted in setting it all up for her. Only problem is I need to transfer all the files from her old computer (our REALLY old one) which doesn't have any USB ports to her new one which doesn't have any floppy disk drives. The old 100MHz 486 (struggling with Win98, poor thing) doesn't have a CD writer, so the only way to get data off of it is using the floppy drive. Neither my laptop nor hers has a floppy drive but both have CD writers (hers even has DVD writing, lucky thing) and many USB ports. Any ideas what I can do? None of the peripheral devices (external CD-RW, USB Flash Drives) will work with the 486 (lack of USB again) and emailing stuff is not an option since she's on pay-as-you-go dial-up at 28.8 Kbps. Most of the files are too big to fit on a floppy anyway. I suppose I'll have to buy a serial-to-USB converter but meeeeh... So, help?

Pssst, it's funny - none of the computers on sale in the shop had any form of floppy drive with them. Those things are like, SO out. Like omgwtf. :P