Tesco are selling an Acer Aspire 4315, online at Tesco Direct, for £269. That's a brand new laptop for £269. With a gigabyte of RAM, a DVD-RW, 80GB HDD, built in wi-fi, all the usual fluff, basically.

But, in case you didn't get it, it's only £269!!!

We just bought one. It came the next day. It's great. And you know what's even better?

At the recommendation of a developer working for a client of mine (thanks Colin!) I have finally downloaded the Beta of Apple's browser, Safari 3, for Windows. It's pretty good actually. And as he was telling me, if you work to Safari when theming your site it seems to work in almost anything else. Which is a handy trait.

I'm going to give it a go for a month or two and see what happens. It may well become my browser of choice if it makes CSS development less painful!

I have a use case that Drupal doesn't handle very well out of the box. It's funny, as you'd think it would be something everyone would want and, as such, there would be a stronger contribution in the core. The use case is this:

"Site administrator can filter site users by any available criteria and contact them via email as well as save them as mailing groups."

The Watchdog is an incredibly useful feature of Drupal. A catch-all (or as much of all as you might want it to) system logger, invaluable for de-bugging and all sorts of other smart things too, like access information, PHP warnings, last cron runs, etc.

The problem with Watchdog is it can get very VERY large. Very quickly. That's exactly why Watchdog, by default, only keeps a couple of week's-worth of data. But sometimes even this is too much.

One of the most painful experiences you are likely to have with Drupal 5.x, or earlier, is altering the menus served up by the core User module. Thankfully, Drupal 6 permits editing the User module menu items (or so I'm assured) and also has the seemingly useful hook_menu_alter, which I guess works in a similar fashion to hook_form_alter but, predictably, for menus. (I haven't verified this.)

I spent today working on setting up a basic version of the WhatTalent community website. It's early days, but I'm quite pleased with the day's work. My client, Olly, is too. In fact, he seems to be staying up all night populating his blog!

I think the neatest feature is the little "Shoutbox" I've made for him. I was going to install the Shoutbox module when it occurred to me a "shout" is just a short string of text.

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I have finally found the time to create a personal website using Drupal. Silly really. The whole thing only took about four hours, and here it is, but you know how things are. Best intentions and all that.

Anyway, Happy New Year to one and all, and I can check at least one resolution off my list! ;-)