RSVP GOD DAMMIT!

About ten weeks from now I will no longer be a single man. I'm sure if you asked my partner, he would be able to tell you just how many weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds there are to go. He's THAT excited, bless his cotton socks!

I'm excited too I must admit and more than a little nervous. I'm not nervous about saying "I Do" but just nervous and FUCKING STRESSED about everything that needs to be done. Luckily the major bits are all done and dusted, thanks in a very large part to my parents in my home town without whom we wouldn't be able to pull this shingdig off.

What I can't fathom is how slow the invitation replies are in coming back. Maybe because the wedding is on a Friday afternoon and people need to get the day, or very least, the afternoon off work, but we sent them about in January. It is now March 7th and we put April 5th as the deadline for replies. We even included self addressed stamped envelopes (in all but a few to far reaching climes) to encourage people to reply. I mean, they didn't even have to queue in the post office for a stamp or waste valuable spit on sealing the envelopes. They are peel 'n stick. Plus we put pretty little star stickers on them....ooh shiney!

Still, we get a 'verbal' sorry, or an email instead. Fine, I'd rather have that than nothing at all, but for everyone who got an inviation...please, post the reply back to us. We went to great effort and expense...and would really appreciate you taking a moment to send the reply back in the correct fashion.

We realise, at least for our UK friends, the trip to Canada is a very long way and not a cheap trip either. But, we are planning on holding a party in London in the summer to celebrate with our UK chums. Those who got an invite to the wedding will also get an invite to the party....that is, if they've taken the time to reply to the wedding invite.

If you've NOT yet replied, please do so NOW, don't leave it until the very last day. Weddings don't organise themselves, and the total number of people attending is rather an important thing to know, especially if you want feeding after the ceremony and at my parent's party two days later.

I know I'm being whiney, but have to get it off my chest. I also know hardly anyone who has been invited actually reads my blog. I guess I'm just stressed about the whole thing and wish everyone would reply right away even though I know it's not possible for that to happen. It's out of my control, which I hate.

Some might say, 'calm down dear, it's only a wedding...it's not like you're planning to invade a country'.

They're right. Invading a country would be far easier and at least you don't have to worry about the catering.

WWWhere Do WWWe Go Next?

The internet is cool. It's 'neat-o'. It's the dog bollocks it is.

I've thought so since day I discovered it. Working in IT, I've been lucky to see the growth from a 'fad' to pretty much a way of life for a large part of the world. I remember building my first website in NOTEPAD, using only 'HTML in Seven Days' as my guide. I kind of fell into it - someone at work said, I think we would benefit from one of this web page thingies - why don't you do it - you're good with computers? And so it began. I had the first web site out there for the rather large organisation in which I work as well as the first internet as well. Hell, if you've picked up some of the booklets from a certain department within the organisation, chances are some of the design elements are based on what I did a number of years ago.

But I digress...I think the evolution of the internet is extremely interesting, exciting, and a little bit frightening too. From simple little websites to giants like Amazon, Ebay, MySpace and Blogger. You can run your life without ever having to leave your house. You can ruin your life without ever having to leave your house. I met the man of my dreams thanks to the internet and there's no way in hell we would be able to plan our wedding in Canada if it wasn't for the magic of the web.

I wonder if Tim Berners-Lee had any idea what his little creation would become....and where it would go next. And to me, that's the exciting bit - where are we taking the internet, and where is it taking us?

This marvellous video has some interesting ideas about that.





Makes you think don't it?

Sticky Words

This year, I have a Magnetic Poetry Calander hanging in my office. For the past several years, I've had a Robbie Williams one, however this year's was rather disappointing. In other words, there were no decent shirtless shots of him.

In any case, I buy a MagPo Calander every year just for the words and add them to my fridge, as you may have read in a previous post.

Anyway, as I finally get around to flipping over to February, I though I would share with you the first of hopefully twelve poems I'll compose on this calander.

If you're unable to read it (I took it with my camera phone), it reads as follows:

keep love warm and full

look sing shine and laugh

grow more every day

always eat more cake

Not exactly earth shattering but I like it and hey, eating more cake can't be bad now, can it?

The Point of No Return

I must apologise for the rather large spaces between the paragraphs in the last post, and possible this one as well and probably future ones as well. I tried to remove the pointless 'div' tags and replace them with 'p' tags but to no avail. Those of you who have no idea what I'm on about, never mind. Move along, there's nothing to see here except a large amout of space between paragraphs.

Despite the 'new' and 'improved' Blogger coming out of Beta there still seems to be loads of problems, and 'extra' carriage returns seem to be one of them.

But never mind, I found an extremely helpful explanation in 'Blogger Known Issues' section which reads....

There are general formatting issues in various places throughout the application. These are mostly just cosmetic and nothing to worry about in terms of functionality.

Well, that's ok then isn't it?

I think what they really mean to say is this:

There's lots of problems in lots of places. These problems make you look like you don't know how to format your writing properly. Maybe we shouldn't have moved out of Beta so soon, but well, we wanted to open the champagne a bit early. Oh, but don't worry....everything still works. Honest.

I really do hope the BloggerGods pull their finger out soon and solves these 'formatting issues' soon. I like Blogger for its ease of use but am not so stupid that I wouldn't be able to set up something in Typepad or LiveJournal in a few minutes if I wanted to.

Grrr.