Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

“Change is the essence of life.Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.”
~Mahatma Gandhi

I know I've not blogged for a while, but thats what having a new girlfriend will do to a chap. Especially a chap who's been living a pretty insular existence and not even realising it. I feel like that guy in the cave who doesn't realise it's a cave until he leaves. On a personal note I've started cooking again. I've gone from using meal times as a chance to re-fuel to enjoying preparing a meal. They are no longer a nuisance that had to be done to stop my hands shaking, but rather a chance to sit, eat, talk and be still for a moment. I guess the main driving force behind that is my girlfriend - Shes proving to be pretty inspiring. I've started wet-shaving my head, too. I first did it because, y'know, what the fuck? It might look okay? It does. In fact it looks pretty fucking cool. It's hella fiddly, though and I'm forever having to run my hands over my head to check for fuzzy patches I've missed, but it looks very nice and feels pretty sweet, too.

I'm investing in a new 'phone! In a bid to get the most out the silly money I spend on mobile (~£20-30 a month D:) I'm switching from Pay-as-you-go on Virgin mobile to a pay monthly job on O2. Not only does it mean I will get more minutes/ texts for my money but it means a new handset, too. Not the shoddy Motorola one I have at the moment (incidently, what the fuck is up with the OS on it? It should respond in time to my key presses, not when it feels like it) but a Sony Ericsson k800i. Which gives me boners. A lot of them.

I've spent a little time buggering about with my computer today as well, at least the look of my desktop. I've installed Objectdock, something I played with before years ago, but I thought "why not?" It's not a Mac-u-like thing, but just to mix it up a bit. Likewise with the Yahoo! Widgets. Yeah, they are some Macs have been doing for approximately forever, but again, I thought "why not?" It's a bit of fun and it's not like I'm short of resources now (notice the dual-core CPU monitoring going on in the bottom left?). Likewise with playing about with iTunes. I've had a long hatred of it, but what the hey, seeing as I learnt to like WMP, why not iTunes, too? I dunno. It seemed like a good idea at the time. It doesn't hurt that there's a widget for it, either.

Possibly the thing that gets me the most excited is Google reader. I know all our base are belong to Google, but this is possibly the niftiest shit they have shown me so far. Its an online RSS reader. I was beginning to get pissed off with Flock anyway and it's bugginess, so I looked longingly at Firefox, but was hesistant knowing its embarrasingly poor handling of all things RSS. However, Google reader opens as a web-page, will import OPML files (which Flock happily exports), recognises the folder hierarchy you may have set up (something Opera doesn't if you import feeds into it) and refreshes the page a la Ajax. Oh, and it shows the number of unread feeds in the top of the tab, like Gmail does with unread mails. I for one, welcome our new Google-overlords.