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*

So, I took the plunge and installed PHP and MySQL on my computer so I don't have to upload all my pages every time I want to change something. I found a nice little package called xampp which has absolutely everything I need in it. I was going to install Apache, PHP and MySQL separately, but it was just my luck that Apache.org was down at the time. >.<

In other highly interesting news, I'm finally getting round to updating my question and answer script, PHPAskIt. Does anyone have any suggestions of improvements/features that need adding or even things that need removing? So far I have no ideas other than redoing the layout and general look of the thing. Oh, and I will make categories optional, as well as the option to update them from the admin panel instead of the itty-bitty list thing in the config file.

I still haven't got any ideas for layouts. Ranee suggested I make a Christmassy (if that's not a word then it is now) type one, which I have to say I'm rather tempted by. However, what to do and how to do it is still something that bothers me. Bleh.

By the way, my Wordpress comment notification emails are suddenly working again. Whaaat? I changed nothing. I didn't upgrade WP, I didn't change my mail settings, I didn't do anything. Weird.

Speaking of weird mail servers... xampp comes with a local mail server for receiving SMTP requests and such. Now, at first I thought the reason I wasn't getting the mail was because I had the wrong configuration options and/or coding. Wrong: it's actually Norton AntiVirus blocking it because of some error thing. I disabled email scanning, both incoming and outgoing, and even disabled NAV completely - nothing doing, it's still scanning my SMTP port and blocking anything I send out that isn't through Outlook Express. Grrr. I swear, Symantec are in league with Microsoft, trying to make people stick to their products and in turn insuring high income for both parties. Windows is full of "virus holes" and things, and NAV seems unwilling to do anything that's not to do with IE or Outlook/Outlook Express. *Grumble*

Edit: Ra. I caved and installed the Gravatar plugin. Wootiness.

I'm going back home to Reading next week to (re)do my driving test. My temporary instructor (while I'm at uni) says she's very pleased with my driving now, but I still have to watch for the whole stopping-too-abruptly-too-close-to-obstructions thing that failed me on my last test. Blah. Also have a week off after that, not sure whether to spend it in Reading (with my parents) or here in Warrington with the boyfriend. We'll see, it depends on the workload I'm given for said "week off" (officially called "Directed Self Study/Reading week"). [By the way, that's reading as in reading a book. My home town is spelt the same way but is pronounced "Redding". Confused? Good. :P ]

And guess what... the accomplishness of my last entry totally does not apply anymore. Washing up has piled up again, there's very little food, and laundry definitely needs doing. Boyfriend's work shirts need cleaning before Monday at least... But the last wash (done yesterday) isn't dry yet. *Mutters* We don't have a dryer, so we hang things in the bathroom (not outside, since it's been raining for the past few days). However I think it's too humid in there. The last wash took 4 days to dry. Grrr.

Wow, I'm blogging about washing. O_O Do I really have nothing better to say? *Thinks* No, doesn't look like it...

Edit: Oh yeah, I finally sorted out my WP CMS issues. Now I shall be making pages using aforementioned blogging tool. Oh yes. (For those of you who didn't know, and for those of you who care: the paging funtion of my WP installation wasn't working too well and I realised it was because I was missing a part in my theme since I'd converted it from WP 1.2. Yayness. I'm still have the comment notification problem though. Bah.

Edit #2: WP, your annoying little habit of trying to correct every bit of HTML I put into my posts is extremely annoying, since 99.9% of the time you get it wrong. Grrr, bah, phoot. (Don't ask.)