Putting it all together (and taking it all about)

There's always a certain feeling of excitement when something clicks into place inside my head, like the world suddenly became slightly more exciting.

Even little things can have this effect, and one of the more common examples is etymology, where a word that's always been "just a word" suddenly becomes obviously made up of other words.

I'm reading a Sharpe book after Joe lent it to me, and there's some Spanish guerrilla fighters, who are referred to as fighting the "little war" (i.e. hit and run, short attacks, rather than thousands of troops at once). And I realised that, of course, guerrilla comes from guerr (war) only smaller (illa and ella and similar suffixes usual denote diminuation of the major word-part).

Suddenly "guerrilla" goes from being a random sound associated with certain types of fighting, to having a slightly poetic meaning and stronger connotations.

I love the feeling when words suddenly make sense.

Getting bigger all the time...

Apparently Stirling is now a City.

This means we can look forward to higher unemployment, homeless
problems and crime.

On the plus side, the nightclubs should get better.

Oh, the Tollbooth Theatre mentioned in the press release is over the road and down about 30 feet. They've been digging it up since last century and it's been keeping my flatmates awake (my room is on the other side of the flat). Now it's finished they'll be playing music there all the time and undoubtably annoying them even more.

Infested

I was just reading an articleon Slashdot about fair software installation.

It talks about software that installs itself without asking you, for its own ends. Software that usually comes bundled with other software that you might actually want (DivX, for instance, can come bundled with Gator).

The article mentioned Ad Aware a rather spiffy package that scans your computer (registry and files) for programs that have infested it, and then removes them all.

Unfortunately, the site seems to have been slashdotted by thousands of geeks running to get a new toy.

When I started Ad-Aware running, it picked up 3 components instantly. I then had a thought, downloaded the latest signature pack (which contains signatures for all the files that Ad-Aware supports) and started scanning again. It immediately picked up 4 components. My old signature file was less than 3 months old.

There appears to be a war going on, between the producers of these packages and Ad-Aware. I'm hoping that, like the antivirus people, Ad-aware keeps on top of the situation. It's probably a product I'd actually pay money for.

Thoughts.

Amusingly, no sooner has Joe said "not a single person I know irl actually posts honest (or scandalous) thoughts on their LJs." than Gordon does.

The Internet Rocks!

My internet access just dropped from £52 a month to £30 a month (including VAT).

Yay! Between the 5 of us, that's £6 a month for a 512kbit connection!

Yay!