I got my HotHomailmail address back today, seven months and two days after it got hacked. I’ve tried to log in every day since then because Hotmail addresses usually expire after ninety days of inactivity (sometimes sooner). Anyway, mine didn’t- maybe the hacker was logging in every once in a while to keep it active, who knows.

So, every day I’ve been making deliberate bad login attempts with passwords like thanksfornothingmicrosoftthisaccounthasbeenhijackedandyoudontcare. I’ve been doing this until Hotmail says ‘Too many incorrect login attempts- this account has been temporarily locked’. Eventually this is all that would happen, even after one attempt. Hotmail had put a permanent lock on the account. Well, apparently not that permanent, because when I tried this morning it just told me that the account didn’t exist. I almost fell over. A few seconds later I had signed up and now I own gregorwright [at] hotmail [dot] com again. Now I’m going to use it to email Microsoft once a day, thanking them for their swift customer support response.

I forgot to mention that I’ve been tinkering with things again…

The links on the memes page are all live now. I recoded the dream generator in php, so it should work in all browsers; the indifference engine is still the best way of browsing the web at random in ten second intervals; and there’s a variety of other crap to download.

Well, there goes another gap in posting. Sometimes it’s nice to not bother staring at a computer screen for a while. And for some reason I never seem to post very much in September anyway. If you really want to fill in the gap, you can read it in the real world next month.

The truth is, nothing much exciting has happened recently. The weather has slowly been getting colder and darker and although I like the autumn, it’s getting round to that time of the year again. Oh, well. On the plus side, my martial arts quest is due to resume again soon with some kung fu, so that’s good.

Today I am in bed with a hangover. My head is like a jar of wasps. I need to get it together at some point though because Laurie has got show opening at Transmission tonight. I’m too psychically disrupted to post anything more. Time to play Snake.

I’ve been fine tuning the site instead of posting. I changed the template again because I got bored of the last one in less than a week which is never a good sign. (It wasn’t colourful enough). And amongst other fairly unimportant developments, I fiddled around so that you now can tune in from your mobile phone, Blackberry or other handheld status symbol, and read about how I haven’t been posting anything so that you can actually read this fact on the way to work. Or the pub. Or custody.

Anyway, I’ve maxed out on this sort of fucking around and it so it should be back to business as usual now. Plus, I also want to get on with my latest pet project. Here’s the three-point plan:

1. Download world wide web.
2. Correct spelling mistakes.
3. Re-upload.

This is another test to see if I can send video clips direct from my phone…

View/Listen

This is a test to see if I can post images and text from my phone… Expect to see all sorts of ‘hilarious’ predictive-text errors.

It is a peice of old newspaper that was behind the wall in our bathroom. The date reads August 5th 1964.

Somehow or other I managed to miss a lot of the Live 8 gig on tv on Saturday. I did manage to tune in in time to see Madonna doing her thing and shouting, "Are you fucking ready?", which according to today's paper, got 354 complaints. So it just goes to show that while Africa remains in a bad way ('fucked' if you will) and despite the effort to bring attention to the issue, some people still prefer to be offended by one of the oldest, best and most versatile words in the English language. Dear me.

And it seems as if things have started to kick off in Edinburgh ahead of Wednesday's G8 clown convention. There was footage on the news tonight that I only really saw in passing but could be described in broad, inaccurate terms as cops beating hippies in submission. So who knows what's going to happen in two days time. Apart from some kind of progress on the way the West treats Africa, I've got to be honest and say that George Bush choking on a stray golf ball is quite far up my wish list.

When was the last time you laughed out loud at a recipe? I'm quite tempted to try and make an enormous scotch egg.

I meant to mention this sooner, but Jamie has written a picaresque novel. Sales have probably dropped back into quadruple figures, so you should get your copy now while you still can.