We came back from the cinema (Night at the Museum) to find I’ve just had an email out of the blue from Gameplay to say that my Wii is in the post!

They include Parcelforce tracking numbers, and when I put those into Parcelforce’s website, it says the package is already at the Nottingham Central Depot!

This does come as a surprise. I’ve been looking at the Gameplay website periodically to see if they have any information, and they’ve had no changes, and no useful information on the site since I ordered. Their help section says:

Nintendo Wii Stock
We do not have a current due in date for our next batch of stock so we cannot inform you of when your order will arrive, or if you place an order now how long it will take to arrive.
We are hoping to cover our pre orders for Xmas but at this moment in time we cannot guarantee this.
We will try and keep you informed of our stock situation via email.

So to be getting it tomorrow (?) is a bit of a surprise!

I feel this awful… ache… coming on.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was… highly contagious.

I’ve been getting a sudden flurry of e-mails about my recording of The Invisible Man.

Which is nice.

One today reminded me I mentioned my website twice in every chapter.  Maybe that is a little excessive.

And the other one was sent by an American who lives 25 miles from Mount Rushmore.  (How cool is that?  And now I know that’s in South Dakota, which I didn’t know before, and that it’s carved out of the Black Hills of Dakota, which I only previously knew from Calamity Jane.)
Everyone who says they enjoyed my stuff gets a link to my current ‘work in progress’, Around the World in 80 Days.  I don’t know when I’ll manage to find the time to simply sit down and read the rest. And there are loads of other projects I said I’d help out with that are getting neglected, too.  Bah.

One of the most interesting things about reading a blog is when something totally out of the ordinary happens to them, and they write it up.

JP is someone I met in passing in NG1 back in the days when I still went there (so more than four years ago now) and have had in my MSN contact list since, even though I haven’t actually spoken to him. He cropped up blogging in links from Reluctant Nomad (now in Amsterdam) and Troubled Diva.

His company send him to China periodically to do recruitment. His description of Beijing and working in China are interesting enough by themselves to make his blog worth reading.

But then suddenly one day last year, he got hit by a bus in Beijing. Literally. Forgot a bus lane had traffic going the wrong way on a one way street, and he walked out in front of one. Suddenly the blog went quiet, and his friends in the UK posted messages about how things were going.

Last week he resurrected his own blog to give his point of view. Happily, all seemed to end well, although it was pretty scary at the time.

My phone will play MP3s as text alerts and ringing tones.  I no longer need to download anything specific.  For ages, I’ve had an MP3 of the CSI theme, and a dalek squawk as my text tone.

The dalek did not go down well in the office, mostly because if it goes off when it’s quiet it’s a nasty tone that makes everyone jump.  For a while it’s been an MP3 downloaded from the BBC language websites – an Italian woman saying Grazie.

But all change tonight.  Now I have “Ring ring ring ring ring Bananaphone” to ring, and a fabulous 2 sec snippet from Dolly Parton singing “Why’d you come in here looking like that?”

It’s in the song:

I am the Seeker
You are the Keeper

Last night whilst idly watching What Women Want out of the corner of my eye, I was using my mobile phone to browse the internet.  I seem to spend most of my leisure time in front of two or three simultaneous stimuli.

And I happened upon Amazon.co.uk from the mobile browser.  The Amazon website scales really well, and that is the dangerous discovery.  Now I can idly browse bookshops from anywhere in the country instead of having to remember what I wanted to look up when I get home.

The news of Magnus Magnusson dying sent me straight… to b3ta.

After almost any celebrity death, the wags on http://www.b3ta.com start doing humourous takes in very poor taste.  They had Saddam bungie jumping within hours.  And you just know that these images and the jokes will be circulating virally in email very soon.  It’s still nice to see them in b3ta first.

Nothing too bad yet – just this, a rather fetching tribute.

We’re close upon a deadline which means long evenings in the office.  Tonight we wanted pizza, but it was my new colleague’s first time at Lambarellis, the excellent local Italian deli, so I popped down the road to pick up a pizza leaflet listing what they had.

Shock, horror, they had no leaflets!  I had to borrow their laminated shop copy to show H the range of pizzas.  Then I noticed the shop copy was in red and black, and our printing machine can automatically take red-and-black originals and reproduce them in two colours.  This was a feature of the machine I hadn’t yet tested, so the pizza shop leaflet went on the printer, and when I went back 40 minutes later to collect our orders, I took 60 two-colour copies of their leaflet with me to tide them over til their own came back from the printer.

They were really chuffed.  Which was nice.  And they let us have the pizza for free. Not bad for a few minutes work.
Mind you, we are very frequent customers at Lambarellis.  Then again, that’s because they’re so good.  Huge range of sandwiches, pizzas, salads, jackets, panini, booze.

I have just been poking around my web host with my FTP client, and found a huge file called error_log. It’s about 41MB.

Peeking at it, it seems to have entries like this one:

[07-Nov-2006 07:11:11] PHP Warning: Unknown():
Unable to load dynamic library './/usr/local/lib/ixed.4.3.lin' -
.//usr/local/lib/ixed.4.3.lin: cannot open shared object file:
No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

[05-Oct-2006 19:25:17] PHP Warning: Cannot modify header information
- headers already sent by (output started at
/home/privatedirname/public_html/wp-includes/wp-db.php:102) in
/home/privatedirname/public_html/wp-rss2.php on line 8

… over and over again. In fact, it seems to be every 4 seconds since the 5th Oct last year, and since the timestamp is now, it still seems to be growing.

What does it mean? How can I fix it?