Avast there, splice the lemon juice.

My brother Richard has just come online to inquire as to whether November comes after October, and I notice that he has changed his avatar to a picture of a pile of pancakes wearing an eyepatch. There's something not quite right about that boy.

I've had another rather hectic day - the robot meeting didn't go as well as I'd hoped, and I'm not sure that we agreed on standardising much at all. Even the idea of a head for the robot may be scrapped to simplify it further, as we have a "caller" in the form of text on the screen that can sort of work around any limitations that our robot has. Sorry, that was an awful description, but it makes sense if you're on the project, I promise. I didn't even do much during the two hours I was attempting to do the practical (one week to go now). It's quite amazing, I've been out for over six hours today and still haven't accomplished anything. Such is life.

Oh, but good news - I finally got around to trying Skype, the Internet telephony program that raphx recommended ages ago. As it's got both PC (hooray) and Mac (boo, hiss) versions, it means that hopefully when I get a cheap microphone from Argos, whinknee and I will be able to talk without worrying about the gigantic transatlantic phone bill.

I'm sorry. I didn't mean that about Macs. But I have decided that the only decent mod-players in the world are made for the PC, as both the Mac CocoModX and the Linux XMMS can't handle string bends properly - to avoid it going hopelessly out of tune I have to tell an instrument to bend manually using a portamento up then correcting it on the next line rather than just apply the effect to one whole instrument and use it throughout. And if you understood that, you'll know just how awkward that is.

The first four episodes of Life, the Universe and Everything are up on my shared folder. Again, if you don't know the IP, just ShareScan it - it's the one with the biggest (and let's face it, only) power metal collection on ResNet.