father, it has been six million two hundred and twenty four thousand minutes since my last confession. or something like that. in orders words, long time no blog. up until 30 seconds ago, i was feeling incredibly stressed to the point of illness and generally rather horrible. then i saw my previous blog entry and it made me feel better. work is absolutely, totally unenjoyable at the minute. there is pressure on all sides and it will be a mark of my good abilities to be able to weather the storm. so far though, things be goin’ bad, but not disastrous. i just wish i wasn’t working six days a week, 12-14 hours a day. in a way, i don’t mind as i quite like working. i don’t like the pressure, but i’m getting used to it. and the end result is very much worth it. i bought a new laptop this week. after an incredible amount of umming and ah-ing over what to get, i bought an www.laptopsdirect.co.uk/Asus_A6F_Laptop_A6F-AP007H/version-1.asp" target="_blank" title="Asus A6F">Asus A6F which is basically slightly cheaper then my last one, 50g lighter, and far more powerful. it also has built in bluetooth (which i wanted), a card reader, and a web cam (which i didn’t need but is a nice bonus). it also comes with a laptopb bag (which i wanted), optical mouse, proper manual and disks and some decent software. so i’m quite impressed. the only catch is that on the version i’ve got, the leftmost key on the bottom row is the function key, not control, so copying and pasting’s going to take a bit of getting used to. daniel’s buying my old laptop (for a decent price) so i’m going to go drop it off to him in a minute, then go to the thingbox party, where i might get drunk. i don’t know. i have to work tomorrow building servers so i might only have a couple. we’ll see. hopefully lots of nice people will be there anywho. that’s all for now. it’s good to be blogging again. j. x