I feel bad that I haven’t written in a while. I’ve entered the final two weeks of term and I was intending to construct an ordered list of my priorities (1 Sleep/eat, 2 Read personal mail, 3 Read haddock … 7 Write papers…) but it was one of those ideas that after more than a few minutes of thought stops being amusing and clever and simply becomes dull.

Besides which, it’s too difficult. “Reading UKNM,” for example, comes way down the list by any objective measure. And yet I will still spacebar my way through the day’s questions about domain names and demographics as a diversion before I give in and acknowledge I really do have a lot of words to write in only a few days.

The diversions I find to avoid opening Word are numerous. I simply had to spend a while pottering around CDNow listening to thirty second snippets of “electronica” because I need some new head-down-type-fast music before the weekend. And it was essential that I spend five minutes putting together an MP3 playlist of similar music for the same reason. That this lead on to another 15 minutes of re-organising all of my MP3 playlists and correcting ID3 tags is an unfortunate side-effect of such essential activities. And then there’s all those other impulsive activities to get in the way of writing: the Napster searching for the one song missing from my Pi soundtrack; the playing with Deepleap (well, it’s new, I have to play with it now!); the listening to an old, old collection of downloaded audio clips from My So-Called Life…

Unless something terribly exciting happens between now and the end of the month I may not be updating this page because it’s not high on that list of priorities. And I don’t want to have to admit to more time-wasting techniques.