ooh, a whole two inches! It always amuses me to see quite how badly this country copes with a tiny bit of snow - traffic chaos, schools closed, nothing else on the news for days because it's all so very exciting... I expect that anyone in any of the many countries that get regular snow (and know how to cope with it) are pointing and laughing at us right now.
I say that, but I am currently sat at home rather than being at work, because the roads are horrible and I'd rather not risk crashing my car. It's annoying, because I had important things to do today, and I know that the main roads will be fine (as they actually get gritted). But I don't want to risk the 5 miles of country lanes - this morning might have just about been ok (and I did spend a good half hour considering it), but it's still snowing fairly heavily and isn't supposed to stop all day so getting home could have been a slight nightmare, especially if it starts freezing 
Quite nice to think that in a few weeks time I could (and hopefully will) be living somewhere much less remote where a few flakes of snow won't stop me leaving the house.
On the plus side, it's very pretty out there. I've been for a walk up to the castle and taken some photos. However I only got half way up the road before I slipped and landed on my arse, right in front of a load of kids. They laughed, which I don't think was entirely fair. At least they didn't throw snowballs at me I suppose...
Also watched a tesco delivery van sliding all over the place.
Wandering around Ludlow today I spotted an advert in a shop window for some rubbishy anti-wrinkle cream or other. Not usually something I would think about for any more than half a second, because I am nowhere near arsed enough about wasting money on face cream, but this was different. Bad Science. One of my favourite things to rant about.
If electromagnetic waves can penetrate walls, imagine what they can do to your skin.
It might have actually used the magic word "radiation" instead of waves - I can't remember. ooh, doesn't that all sound exotic and sciencey and BAD! Electricity! Magnets! Radiation! Dangerous stuff.. and oh my god these things can get through walls! We must do something now to protect ourselves from this terrible threat before it's too late!
I'll get my tinfoil hat...
Obviously there are people stupid enough to fall for that crap, but really I wonder how many of those people use sunbeds, microwaves, mobile phones, lightbulbs, heaters, daylight etc etc etc.
Saying that, skin obviously does need some protection from some em radiation. It's called sun tan lotion. Without it I turn into a lobster.
Actually I think I remember reading something fairly snarky (so probably on The Reg) about whatever wrinkle cream this was a few weeks ago... And laughing, a lot. Fools. Now I might go and read up on the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide.
As a slight distraction from my current fairly high level of "ohmygod I have to move house" stress and panic, I spent a good few hours this weekend playing with my desktop. This was brought on by some reading up on KDE4.. sod vista, I know what I'd rather use 
First off - removing ALL icons. I can't stand having more than about 3 icons on my desktop. One of the (many) things I love about linux is that whenever I install something, I don't mysteriously end up with thousands of icons and shortcuts scattered all over the place. aaah.
Most used programs are down on the taskbar (or left running all the time), and the wastebin is too. Any other programs that I use are easily found on the menus. Might shrink those icons a bit though, they're taking up quite a lot of space. Might also lose the virtual desktop icons, seeing how I've had them for two years and used them about four times. heh.
Next step - widgets! Desktop widgets are fairly pointless actually. But they're very shiny, especially as I've got them all set to be slightly see through. Quite into transparency at the moment - it would be rather cool if I could get all unfocussed windows to be slightly transparent. mmm.
The weather forecast is very pointless, and probably won't stick around for long. Contacts list is useful - I've always had a contact list window open in about that position, so at least this way it blends in a bit better. Could take a while to get used to having various peoples' ugly mugs staring out at me from the sides of my windows though, heh. And look at Mark with his naughty sweary picture! tut tut.
System monitor thing is good though, in terms of displaying mostly useless info that I already know. Note slightly pants uptime - I somehow managed to reboot the computer yesterday, which was annoying as I was only intending to restart X. Uptime had been up to 15 days 
It's also lacking in CPU temperature for some reason. I dd some poking around and got told "No support for device type: thermal". How useful 
Will probably have to do some modprobing and other prodding to get that working.
Then when I got bored of widgets (might add one that shows my 'now listening' though, for extra pointlessness), I started on tweaking actual settings. Now have smaller and slightly nicer fonts for things, tidier menus, a marginally better file save/open dialog in firefox and some other miscellaneous improvements.
[slight edit - I remembered how to make everything see through! it's ace 
but a bit laggy...]
tags: Shropshire weather 
