The flat is done. All but the oven, which was pretty much ruined by the guy who lived there before me. There was still food in the grill when I moved in and a nasty load or tar in the pan below it.

So, ready for renting. That said, though, I bumped into the renter-outer next door who was in the process of changing his locks. He’s just got rid of his last set or renters and is selling up after a nightmare experience. The cow of a woman who was living there – the same one who would come back home at two in the morning and slam the door four or five times like it was the first time she’d ever been in a building with doors – has finally gone.

But now he can’t get rid of the mess she’s left behind – even with professional cleaners. And she stayed a week longer than she should have done. And now the flat is filling up with dodgy post, all with her first name but with a whole town’s-worth of different surnames.

Unlucky or par for the course?

Hmmm…

Oh, and someone has paintballed my car. Twice. The splat on the back is pink, which is quite delightful, but the yellow one at the front is very annoying.

I hope they wash off.

Um.

Achievements. Lots, actually. I took down the last of my pictures yesterday, and then did a buzz around B&Q this morning to pick up paint, rollers and filler. Things have moved on since last time I did any painting. They now have panther print, or zebra stripes on the rollers if you want. I was very tempted, until I found a whole rollers-tray-brushes combo. I’m easily bought.

So, I sealed the side of the bath, which I should have done years ago, and although it’s not neat it does at least look like it would keep the water out. The secret, apparently, is to half-fill it with water so it’s already stretched by the weight, then when you let it drain, after the sealant has dried, it all squashes back into place.

Let’s see if it’s all still there tomorrow.

I picked yellow paint for the walls. A bit darker than the yellow that’s on them already so I can see the bits I’ve done, but still fairly similar so if I miss a little stripe here or there it shouldn’t show.

It feels like a bit of a cheat, but I got a roller on a pole taller than myself. A bargain at

Come on then, spammers. Do your worst.

Two simple changes, which I hope will make a big difference. First, in an attempt to stem the average of 2000 spams I get a day, I’ve put in two lines of protection on my email. Then, so I can unblock the commenting feature on this blog, I have finally got my head around MT-Blacklist and removed all of the blocked IP addresses in my Movable Type installation.

Apologies to anyone who has been trying to comment on here in the last few days and found themselves blocked. Thanks to Sean Corfield for the email that convinced me to take another look, in spite of the fact I’ve tried and failed to install it three times in the past.

The email spam blocking, though, took a lot of lateral thinking. My problem isn’t so much that I get a lot of junk – Apple Mail filters out most of it – it’s actually more to do with the fact that if I go away for more than two days without doanloading it all, my mailbox gets full and rejects all subsequent messages.

No good when you’re on a fortnight’s holiday.

So, I’ve installed SpamFire on my G3, which is rapidly becoming more than just the iTunes server role it was originally intended to fulfil. As well as acting as a network backup for all far less stable the Windows machines it’s filtering out the spam mail then using Eudora to redirect all the good ones to a separate Tesco POP3 account.

It has to be Eudora rather than Apple Mail since Mail can only do forwarding, which means it ends up rewriting the header so it looks like all email is coming from myself.

That means the original incoming account it getting emptied every fifteen minutes so will never get full and bounce new messages. The second account, meanwhile, fills up so slowly that it should never reach its limit, even if it’s not checked for a fortnight, because it’s only receiving filtered mail.

Of course, some bad ones still get through, but when the filtered account is picked up by my iBook, Apple Mail’s built-in spam trapping gets rid of most of them. The net result: in the last 24 hours the number of spam emails I have received has fallen from 2000 to 19. I can live with that.

The blog, meanwhile, will still get some spam comments, but probably not as many, and they’re one-click deletable anyway, so arriving at work to find 700 new postings on the subject of Xanaax shouldn’t be such a headache in the future.

There’s a lot of banging going on downstairs. It’s the gas man fiddling with the fire. The whole downstairs reeked of gas when we came in this evening, which probably explains why I had a headache from hell at lunchtime.

He’s cut off and capped the pipe to the fire now, so we’re without heating in the lounge, but as the alternative was having no gas at all, and so no radiators, cooker or hot water, it was the best of two evils. It was apparently a very big leak, too – enough to have run a flame off it, he said.

He’s given us an ugly blue and red form full of tick boxes, with a mark beside the words ‘immediately dangerous’.

Fortunately I’ve been off work all day, as I will be on Monday and Tuesday, so I’ve spent most of the day over at the flat where there’s no killer gas. It’s been very productive, and I think I’ve turned the corner now, so the flat is now tidier than the house. It’s also very empty.

Unfortunately there are more holes in the walls that I’d imagined there would have been now I’ve taken down all the pictures, so I think I’m going to have to do more filling and painting than I was intending, but at least I feel I’ve turned a corner now.

I really don’t want to go back there and do any more tomorrow. Perhaps I could put it off until Monday and use the time I’ve taken off to get it sorted out… just to get it sorted out.

Day three and the Apple Store is already looking a little bit jaded. The lovely clean floors have got dirty black rubber scuffs on them from shoppers’ shoes, and it’s crawling with… customers.

All the mystique has gone.

When it was empty and pristine, two days before opening, it was magnificent. Truly spectacular and really what they said it should be – an experience, or a ‘place to belong’. Now, though, it’s just a rather large and half-filled shop.

I wonder how many of the 138 staff will be conscripted into keeping the place clean. Still, it remains the best looking shop in London, and will be far nicer when all the fuss has died down and everyone had buggered off back to Selfridges. It also has free Wifi Internet access if you take your PowerBook or iBook with you, and all the Macs on display are connected to the net, so you have to wonder how long it’ll be before it becomes the hub of free Internet in London.

Oh, and all the guys have very sharp matching haircuts. Almost like they have some kind of make-up person in there making sure everyone conforms to the corporate style…

Now we just need to find a way to spy through all the iSights in there to know when’s the best time to invade.

From BBC News:

Sir Paul McCartney has been chosen to provide the half-time entertainment at this year’s Super Bowl game – the slot filled by Janet Jackson last year.

Organisers have promised there will be no repeat of her nipple-baring incident that sparked thousands of complaints on US TV’s most-watched broadcast.

In fairness, I’m not sure anyone would want a nipple-bearing incident where he’s concerned.

Oh, I had so many things I needed to do yesterday, but instead I spent the whole morning and a good part of the afternoon designing this year’s Christmas cards. Not entirely a waste of time, them, and enjoyable nonetheless. I’ve dispatched one of each design for printing, and they should be back by Tuesday so we’ll see…

After that, cooking, ready for Mark’s imminent arrival. How he’d managed to miss that last night was Junior Eurovision when he’s such a Eurofanatic I don’t know, but he had. Anyhow, he hasn’t got digital TV so he can’t get ITV2, so he’d have missed it even if he’d remembered.

I did Thai green curry, which turned out a lot more sticky and tar-like than intended when he got held up, but was actually very nice. Perhaps I’ll do that again next time. What I won’t do again is the coconut rice, which boiled over on the hob and made a pool of liquid bounty bar on top of the burners.

The Juniorvision was actually surprisingly watchable, and we correctly predicted the top two or three countries. Spain won it – deservedly so. The child looked like some terrifying demon you’d see standing stock still in a horror film, staring wide-eyed out of a cupboard, but the tune was at least semi-bearable, and she sang in tune.

The UK entry was pretty good, too, and we chased Spain all the way through the voting, finishing up in second place.

After that we sat around chatting over tea and Quality Street until about two, so this morning was a leisurely start.

I went over to the flat for the first time in a fortnight. There was a red bill from the management company on the doormat. Apparently I’ve missed a service charge payment. There’s also an eight-inch chunk missing from one of my window frames, too, from where the painters have pulled it off. You can see the edge of the glass and the rain has got into it so it’s sodden now, and probably the whole thing is going to have to be replaced.

Gah!

Anyhow, at least the flat is starting to look very empty now, which must mean I have almost finished moving out.

I see there are seven flats the same as mine for sale in the road now.

So the car picked us up from the office far earlier than I thought it would, and we were at the hotel by half two. The set was still being built in the Titanic-like ballroom, and all the upstairs areas were knotted together in a nest of wires for the cameras, computers and mixing stuff.

So, we sat around drinking coffee while the technical people hit things with hammers and got the cameras lined up, and waited for Nicholas Parsons to arrive so we could do a run-through of the script.

Seems he’d been kept waiting, so he was in a bit of an ‘I’m a star’ mood by the time we got down to business and kept snapping at the behind the scenes people and then launched into his own personal rehearsal while they were trying to sort things out.

It was a shame, as I don’t think I’ll be able to listen to Just a Minute any more after that, and I’ve always enjoyed it in the past.

Anyhow, we got to the end of it – twice – and there was just time to run upstairs and change into the tux before everyone started to arrive.

In the event, we ended up getting underway a bit behind schedule. The weather was awful and so many people were coming from the Expo on the other side of town that they got stuck in traffic. So, half an hour behind schedule, I was doing my intro, and dragging Westie up on stage to surprise him with his birthday present.

It went quite well, apart from the bit at the beginning where they didn’t switch on my microphone. Fortunately a lot of hand-waving from the front couple of rows had them rewinding the autocue so I could go back to the start, and eventually hand over to Nicholas Parsons for the actual awards.

He had a tough job. There was a lot of talking from the tables – probably because everyone had been kept waiting so long – and so a lot of shushing from him on the stage, but towards the end it was getting very difficult to hear him. Still, the commedian was excellent, and everyone seemed to have a good night. The bar stayed open until three this morning, and by half past I said goodbye to the last swaying stragglers, then went slowly up to bed.

You can always rely on Chris to get the crowd dancing

Julian, Brad, June and Me. Karen at the front

Julian, Ruth, Ben

I could have slept for a week, but had to be in a meeting at ten this morning; not even time for a coffee or a cup of tea. I ended up fighting to stay awake through five back-to-back Powerpoint presentations. It wasn’t easy.

The afternoon was far more pleasant. I stopped by at the office to check my mail, then went on to MacExpo in Islington. If the number of people there is anything to go by, next year should be a good one for the Mac, as it was far more crowded than last time around. There was a good crowd at our stand, where Keith and Chris were dispensing advice, and Roxio was dispensing free boxes of MacUser-branded popcorn. Upstairs in the MacUser hospitality room it was chocolate cake and tea, and a steady stream of readers with questions to be answered.

I wasn’t intending to stay long. Harriet was leaving, and so having drinks in the impossibly crowded, and very loud Wax Bar, but after getting stuck in a protracted and largely irrelevant demo of some software and then traipsing back over to the west end it was gone seven by the time I arrived and last night’s lack of sleep was quickly catching me up…

I stayed as long as I could, but sloped off around half eight and, after a brief diversion to look at the queue of people sleeping on the pavement as they waited for the Apple Store to open tomorrow morning, I rode the train home thinking only of bed.

The London Apple Store is very cool. It’s a shame it was raining today, as it made the outside look very dowdy, but the inside is fantastic. The first thing you see is the trademark glass staircase, which goes up to the theatre on the first floor, and although they have the largest collection of Mac products anywhere it doesn’t feel in the least bit crowded because most of it is completely empty – just tables arranged around the edge with Apple kit on it.

I don’t have time to write about it – there’s a car arriving in ten minutes to drag me off to a rehearsal for tonight’s awards, but I’ve done some stuff about it on the MacUser site.

It opens for the general public on Saturday morning.

They’ve put up big gantries over Oxford Street with spotlights on top of each one. They’re supposed to be shining the Olympic rings onto the clouds, but you just get a load of random blobs, like some alien spacecraft is coming down to invade. All in all it’s very unconvincing.

Someone mentioned wrong kind of clouds, but I’m not sure they meant it.

I still haven’t heard a convincing argument for London getting the games. In fact, I can’t even think of a reason why they should come here. We’ve got terrible public transport, a crowded city and the disdain of the world. So, three out of three there.

Oh, and of course, we can’t get any rings on the clouds.

Hmmm…

Richard was in subbing today, reliving his days as Herr Flick, and re-acting just about the only scene I remember from Allo Allo:

INT. HERR FLICK’S BUNKER.
Phone rings. Flick answers.

FLICK
Flick, ze Gestapo.

Pause.

FLICK
No, I said Flick ze Gestapo.

Of course, it works far better when he does it himself.

Rather scarily it’s almost twenty years since he did it for real on TV.