Today was the first time this session that I didn't go to class, as I simply felt totally terrible when I woke up this morning. Unfortunately, the lecture and tutorial for the same class were today, but fortunately, it was operations management, which I'm fairly comfortable with. I went to see the nurse this afternoon, but all she did was prescribe me some cough mixture and leave it at that. Honestly, is this the standard response nowadays? I have three bottles of the stuff here at home already! Anyway, I have accounting and economics tomorrow and Thursday, so hopefully I'll be able to attend those classes, as they're actually ones I enjoy.

One odd thing did happen today, and that is that I saw condensation on my bedroom window, the first time this year that I can remember. It was such an unusual event, and the first time I have noticed such a thing in the morning, but I took a photo of it, which you can see below. I just thought I'd throw that bit in for a laugh.

( photo )

In other news, I'm having a bit of a major problem with my credit cards now with regard to available liquidity. I had to ask BarclayCard to increase my limit twice now, as due to the time it is taking for the university to refund my original deposit, and the students awards agency to refund my transport costs, I don't have enough money on the card to cover those same transport costs for which I should be being reimbursed. It’s all quite a mess, and I’ll be very glad when the first of those checks start coming through, and I can get back on to an even keel. I suppose that's something I'll just have to put up with until the whole system gets working smoothly again as it has in previous years.

Well that's about all for now. I don't know if you can tell that this is the first post I've made using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Professional, which I installed on my desktop over the weekend. I’m actually quite happy with it and the reliability and accuracy is quite amazing. Even as I'm writing this, I can see there are actually very few mistakes in the whole post, which I will of course edit before I send this to the web. But until next time, out.

Hello,

Well in my absence things have been slowly falling into place on the home front.

Friday afternoon saw the (final) collection of the damaged bed by the couriers. They were asked to help package it up as I hadn't managed to do it fully before I left. I'm told that they ended up using an entire roll of thick parcel tape and left with the box looking rather, err, mummified. So that's that chapter hopefully concluded, only almost six months to the day when the bed first arrived (yes, I know the majority of the delay was my fault for dragging my feet, albeit unintentionally over it).

My new Nationwide credit card, to replace the one that had it's details stolen was delivered today. It was promptly activated by way of a three way call, during which I deftly fended off the operator's attempts to sell me payment protection insurance which I really didn't want, the card details were read over the phone to me and have now been memorised by my good self, and the card is now once again ready for use. Great!

I also received confirmation from SAAS that my tuition fees and bursary funding for next year have been approved. They have changed the payment schedule from termly to monthly, which is a good thing in a way as it means I have something to look forward to each month, but also a pain as I won't get the big windfall at the start of each session all in one go as I did in the past. Oh well, I'm grateful that all this is available, so let that be that.

Been doing some work on the website. I had the idea to install the Horde mail system, one of the reasons being it's in-built calendar and event scheduling. However, it turned out that I wouldn't be able to as I don't have access to the main PHP install file (being on a shared server) and I'm not allowed to install PHP myself. Incidentally Horde also requires a MySQL database (not a problem as I am able to create an unlimited number), PEAR and lots of other no doubt fascinating modules. I then decided to install Squirrelmail, and then add some plugins on top to improve it's present functionality. Well, at the moment I'm waiting for some advice from support as the perl configuration script won't run, and more annoyingly still, none of the even simple Unix commands are working under SSH. My hope is that I can get this all fixed and be able to provide a better and more tailored web interface for e-mail to users, and one which fits in better with my site.

All for now, more later!

So today I can proudly, or maybe not so proudly say that I've signed up to the club of people who've experienced the perils of digital finance.

I logged into my Nationwide online banking today to check to see whether my cheque refund from Orange had cleared, and my eyes strayed over to the right hand side of the screen, where my credit card balance was shown. WHAT? £708? It was only £100 a few days ago. I clicked to the view the statement of recent transactions, and there, right in front of me sat the damning evidence. Six transactions, all of exactly £100 each, all on 30 May, and all for the benefit of ITUNES MUSIC, LONDON. WHAT? I don't even have an iTunes account, can't standard them, never have and never will, have never bought anything from them in my life, and don't even get me started on the whole music rights issue. £600 on iTunes in one day, what on earth was going on?

I phoned up Nationwide to report this most bizarre, insulting and heart wrenching phenomenon, and was promptly instructed in a polite yet clinical fashion (can we say they've done this before?) that my card would be blocked, an investigation carried out, oh and not to worry a new card would be sent to my address within seven days. Great. Five minutes and it's all sorted, everyone except me is happy and the world can go back to whatever it was doing before... well let's just say the matter was taken care of.

It really does feel like a part of me was attacked, like I've lost a good friend even though it's only for a few days. I was gutted. I was due to go out sightseeing in the afternoon, but instead I just ended up curling up in bed with my female friend (I'm not insane enough to put girlfriend here - the rumours would spread like wildfire!) for a few hours, promptly very nearly missing a flight in the process. But that's another story.

Now I try not to be a frivolous spender or careless with my money, but even so I've become rather attached to my flexible friend (and yes, I know that saying is far too overused). I just hope whoever did this had fun doing it and that they promptly get banned by their ISP for excessive downloading. I mean, that's over 750 tracks! And talking of how they spent it, can they have been any more unoriginal? Honestly, stealing someone's card details to download music of all things.

So, the outcome of this all is that someone, somewhere is walking around with a nice shiny iPod (hopefully that's not stolen as well!) full of tracks at my expense. Somehow I don't feel very gracious about my 'generosity'.