Fixed the links, heh.

The first episode of the course was a little disappointing in that it was just going over old ground to make sure we were all up to speed. It was good, however, in that I learned a few things I didn't know. We spent a bizarrely long time looking at HTML tags that are non-standard and/or proprietorial, and which we were solemnly warned not to use. Uh huh.

The course tutor is the former head of the computer department, a lively fellow who scorns the use of editors -- we're doing all our work on Wordpad, the little text-editing program that comes with Windows. Good practice, but embarrassing; with the HTML editors you just punch the buttons with the purdy pictures on them and the program does all the coding, so I was struggling to remember what to put where. (To see what HTML code looks like, click on the View menu up the top there, and choose Source. You'll get a separate window with the code of this page in it. Kewl!)

Getting up early was traumatic, I had to set the alarm for 7:30am! To complicate matters, Bertie somehow got the impression that I needed to be up much earlier than that, and barked loudly in my ear to tell me it was ... uhhh, I don't know, it was still dark, 6am? Once again, though, I'm amazed at how much you can squeeze into a day when you get up early. Astonishing.

Yesterday, I took Bertie to Arthur's Seat for a looooong ramble, plus did a bit of shopping. When I got home I realised I'd forgotten the main item I'd gone into town for in the first place -- a spare battery for the wonderful camera -- so off I went. While in town I went to my favourite bookshop, which has fallen on hard times and is for sale. It's a tragedy! I used to live just around the corner from the South Bridge branch, the main one. It has three stories crammed full of books. It's an academic bookseller, so it has an incredible range of stuff, plus classical music CDs, plus there's a good stationery department. And it's open until 10pm weeknights. Sigh. They're hoping for a sympathetic buyer rather than an asset-stripper.

I stopped by the Cameo cinema on my way home, thinking I might see Mulholland Drive, but it was two hours to the next showing. I could have seen Apocalypse Now Redux, but I didn't feel up to it. So I went home instead.

My car's dirty again. I hate housework.