A handful of you may have noticed my absence over the last few months. I've been working unusually hard since about October last year and then my PC became intolerable. I guess I hit a bit of a blog wall as well.

Anyway, I'm still really busy but at least I've tooled up with a new laptop - as of this weekend in fact. And that was cause for some unusual geekiness on my part.

I've spent the weekend downloading and growing quickly to love iTunes. It just makes using music (can you use music?) so freakin simple. There are already 180-odd songs in my collections and that will grow fast.

Then I downloaded the Second Life client and popped in to see what it was all about. I don't think I'll be making it a regular stop but it was kinda interesting. Virtually.

I've also downloaded Audacity with vague ideas about podcasts, for work and pleasure.

Anyway, it hasn't all been straightforward. My new Dell is great and Telecom were very patient as I was getting it online (Let's just say I made it unecessarily complicated by being an idiot). Vista I find quite pleasant for a Microsoft OS but I've already had several incompatibilities with older software I wanted to install - and with the drivers of a newish printer.

But still, being able to do all the stuff Chris does ... Magic. Even Blogger is behaving itself, more or less.