Junkyard king.

This quiet domesticity stuff is fantastic. It's such a pity I need to get a job. I switched on the phone yesterday for the first time in a week and fetched about ten pimp messages, most of whom had sensibly emailed per the message. My CV is getting some play; some time this weekend I need to hit Jobserve very hard indeed.

arkady and I bought about £100 worth of CDs from Cash Converters today. I'm busy discovering that pawn shop CDs are beat up enough that even cdparanoia gets upset. I can't beat Exact Audio Copy into working under Wine (Ubuntu Breezy package) and it does a bang-up job on Arkady's new laptop, so I now have a reason to run Windows. Ah well. Oddly, VLC is worst under Unix and best on Mac or Windows (where it's the only reasonable way to play an Ogg) — the Unix version uses crappy GTK+1 widgets and doesn't want to know about your network. Back to amaroK.

(My vinyl records hit Felixstowe any day and, THANK FUCK, my aunt in Amersham has offered to look after them until we move.)

redcountess and I have been eBay whoring big time. Weird Al Yankovic's "eBay Song" (Flash) is about us.

It's bloody cold and my lungs still aren't up to scratch. I expect my chances of hitting Slimelight approach zero. Dammit. STIR CRAZY. Pub on Sunday or Monday, I expect. MUST GO OUT. EVEN A BIT. Not allowed cloves, though. Pfeh. Just because my loved ones saw me in a hospital bed with an oxygen line up my nose, they're tetchy about the idea of me smoking. Domestic nanny state!

Your Jennifer, she just isn't the same.

• Thank heaven for the word "snowclone". Here's a list. NEVER USE ANY OF THESE EVER AGAIN.

• I have just bought a Compaq iPaq MP3 player and card reader for six quid. Just to match the laptop.

Having a taste for the bad and w0rng, I decided to try steer's suggestion of running Exact Audio Copy in VMware Player. Which apparently works, for some value of.

First run through, it froze my system the moment it loaded the VMware module, and froze on rebooting as well. After unfucking it, I followed these directions and then these directions, and it ran okay. (I think g++3.4 was the missing ingredient — it thought it had compiled without it, but evidently not.) Note that the second set of directions tells you to install Wine to run Windows QEMU to install Windows 2000 to make a VMware player file of Windows. If only they'd chuck Bochs and Valgrind in there. All entirely legal, as this laptop still has its Windows 2000 license sticker on the bottom.

I also plan to try EAC in ReactOS in VMware. Why? BECAUSE. It's not like I'm not already going to Hell. Having been working on a new Uncyclopedia article idea: Cancer Porn. I think any really good humour article should make the reader cry in shame and horror. Can I still blame fever delirium?