Went bowling with friends on Saturday night. I haven't bowled in about six months, and it showed. Kept missing to the left every single frame, no matter where I moved. Don't know whether I want to get back into it. I guess I do, but it's a fairly pricey thing to do every week.

Flying

I haven't been on a plane in two months now, and I think I'm starting to get withdrawal symptoms. Despite all the times I've complained about travelling for work, I think I really quite enjoy it. Probably won't go again until August. Every time there's a deal on I get more tempted to go somewhere. Current deals include Cocos Islands for 20,000 points, three nights in Bali for $359, and Canberra to Sydney for $19. The Cocos Islands sounds particularly good.

Flying in the past few years:

• 2002: 14 flights, 38,002 miles (61,158 km)
• 2003: 21 flights, 40,899 miles (65,821 km)
• 2004: 14 flights, 32,603 miles (52,469 km)

Played around with it yesterday for a couple of hours to make it semi-usable. I eventually got a reasonable threaded message view by grouping messages by conversation, and expanding all by default. It's still pretty crap, since although the messages are grouped together there's no indication of the conversation flow.

I set up some categories and made assigned them automatically when the message is received. Then I tried to colour by category, but it wouldn't work at all. Eventually I found that you can't colour by category if the category is one of the displayed fields. That's quite retarded. Also, it seems that colouring by category is very buggy. I had three different categories all set up in the same way. The first two work fine, but the third won't change colour at all. It's dumb.

Outlook seems quite buggy, but I think I've made it over the initial learning curve.

Livejournal and passwords

It came to my attention that a friend has a livejournal, so I went to the trouble of registering an account to post comments. Then I had to set up a journal, which is a complex process. One would think that a "comment only" type account might be good for them.

They're quite fussy about acceptable passwords. So much so that it considered both my "insecure" passwords to be unacceptable. These are passwords that I use pretty much everywhere unless I'm concerned about security for some reason. Obviously I'm not going to give them a secure password (used for internet banking, machine logins, etc) so I had to make up a new one. I hate having different passwords for everything.

I would have thought that if a bank can be happy with a four digit PIN, then livejournal can be happy with six random letters. But I would be wrong.