Some good things

1. Sophie Ellis Bextor's new album, Trip the Light Fantastic, is very listenable. I used to hate her but I have reluctantly accepted that her pop is quite disco. Oddly the album doesn't include the excellent Dear Jimmy off of the popjustice compilation CD.

2. The internet! It means I can pretend to be a knowledgeable geek instead of the loser geek I am, because of all the nice people out there sharing their knowledge. I have set up a .bat file so that my USB pen automatically backs itself up when I plug it into my computer. It sounds all intelligent of me but I got it from this website. I added a "/D" after the xcopy command on the recommendation of one of the commenters, which means that it only alters things which have been changed since I last plugged it in. This is good because I have about 7Gb of data on it. So much more satisfying than the backup programs I have on my computer, which won't deal with removable drives, even though these must be pretty widely used right now. Bad Norton!

3. The Temple Gallery, which sells icons, sends me its catalogues for free even though I haven't ever bought an icon from them, and am unlikely to be able to afford one for many years if ever. Also, it's possible to visit the gallery and I'm going to do that next weekend, to see their current exhibition. If I could afford to I would buy an icon like this one of John the Theologian in silence, or this one of him dictating to his disciple Prochorus.