Many apologies for my sustained absence – believe me, I wish it hadn’t been so long. Anyhoo, I have returned, with a temporary blog here to hold my pearls of wisdom until I finally get round to finishing the new-look version of my full site.

But, I hear you cry, why have I made such a sudden reappearance? Well, I’m going to be spending much of the next week in bed (more on that anon), and feel I may wish to vent my frustration in more than 140 characters. So I shall be publishing, with luck, longer form rants here once again.

So, yes, more blogging here again. Starting tomorrow, with a brief catchup of what’s going on with me and why.

Should be blogging more, but I’ve been awfully busy with work (yes, proper work, here) and haven’t really felt like it. More anon, though, I promise.

Rules: 1. Put your iPod, iTunes, Windows Media Player, etc. on shuffle. 2. For each question, press the next button to get your answer, hit skip if you get the same artist. 3. You must write down that song name, no matter how silly it sounds. 4. Have fun!

If someone asks if you’re OK, you say… “We’re in the Money” by the Original Broadway Cast of 42nd Street

How would you describe yourself? “Sugar and Spice” by the Searchers

What do you look for in a girl? “Brown Eyed Girl” by Everclear

How do you feel today? “Hurt” by Johnny Cash

What is your life’s purpose? “Purpose” by the Original Broadway Cast of Avenue Q (Seriously, this is what came up. I think iTunes is slowly turning into HAL…)

What’s your motto? “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles

What do your friends think of you? “Crazy” by Aerosmith

What do your parents think of you? “Wonderful” by the Original Broadway Cast of Wicked

What do you think about very often? “Little Moments” by Brad Paisley

What do you think about your first kiss? “La Belle et le Bad Boy” by MC Solaar

What do you think of your best friend? “Rolling Stock” by the Original London Cast of Starlight Express

What is your life story? “Crippled Inside” by Widespread Panic

What do you want to be when you grow up? “I Wish I Was James Bond” by Scouting for Girls

What do you think when you see the person you like? “You Raise Me Up” by Josh Groban

What will you dance to at your wedding? “Megamix” by the 1991 London Palladium Cast of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat Seriously.

What will they play at your funeral? “Raiders March” by John Williams

What is your hobby/interest? “100,000,000,000 Green Bottles” by Max Boyce

What is your biggest fear? “If I Can’t Love Her (from Beauty and the Beast)” by John Barrowman

What is your biggest secret? “(I’m Spending) Hannukah in Santa Monica” by Tom Lehrer

What do you want right now? “The Perfect Nanny” by the Original London Cast of Mary Poppins

What do you think of your friends? “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen

What title will you give this post? “Moi j’aime le music hall” by Charles Trenet

I’ve still not got a proper job, seven months after graduating, which is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been doing odd bits of freelance website work, which keeps me busy, but I don’t think counts as a job, and certainly isn’t what I wanted to be doing. Lots of applications, lots of rejections, lots of not hearing anything at all. Most frustrating? Being told that you’re “over qualified” or would “feel restricted by the role”. Frankly, I don’t care – I just want to work!

Still, light at the end of the tunnel, and all that: there’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll end up in the States, where there’s an even bigger jobs market in which to not find work. I’m also seriously tempted to take a PGCE – teaching seems to tick all the boxes on my “what I want from a job” list, and they pay you to train, so that may be what I’m doing next year if the dates work out. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, a snippet from an email I received from East Midlands Trains. Seems they need to revise the difference between “less” and “fewer”…

I’ve decided to sort my books. I have four bookcases in my room, giving 21 shelves, and another two cases in the attic. Lots of books, most of which are where they are simply because that’s the only place there was room for them.

So now they’re not on the shelves, but rather on the floor. Yay. All are being catalogued and sorted, and will then be reshelved according to an approximation of the Dewey Decimal System. An approximation, because there are various books/types of book that I want/have to put in different places.

Various facts and figures:

• I’ve catalogued 750 books so far, and haven’t started on those in the attic.
• I’ve only found 3 duplicates (as in, exactly identical books). One’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, one is Pears Ultimate Quiz Companion, and one is a 1964 Livres de Poche edition of Zola’s Germinal.
• There are 34 Harry Potter books on my shelves, in five languages, with only the one duplicate.
• Somewhat inevitably, the busiest Dewey numbers are 440 and 840 (French Language and French Literature, respectively).
• The ISBN was invented before the barcode.

So, shiny new site. And a shiny new domain at dafydjon.es – see what I did there? (dafyd.me.uk/dafydjones.co.uk will continue to work, of course – I just have some ideas for the different domains that may come to something eventually.)

I’m quite a fan of my Snapshots pages, which presents all of my photos from Flickr in a new light. Sort of. (Geeky aside: there’s some heavy-duty PHP fu happening with the Flickr API pulling those photos in here – if you’re interested, I’d be happy to explain what’s happening.)

The Footprints page tracks what I’m doing elsewhere on the web, just in case you were bothered.

There will, inevitably, be broken links and files that no longer exist. If you’re looking for something in particular, give me a shout and I’ll hunt it out for you. Oh, comments on blog entries now work properly. Yay.

There are various things that I want to add, features that were on the old site that I’ll be bringing across as well as some super-duper new stuff.

For those who care, this is version 5 of my site. Version 4 was (more or less) alive for just over four years. Definitely time for an update.

So, more blogging to come shortly. Much has happened over the past few months, some of which I will be sharing.

It’s just coming to the end of the Easter vacation. Term restarts on Monday; I’m heading up to Durham on Sunday. My Finals start in just under three weeks’ time. I have three essays due by the end of next week, all in various degrees of completion (one on Proust is slowly killing me). Yes, I should be essay-writing now, yet for some reason I’m blogging. Go me. During this vacation, my procastinatory (definitely a word) exercises have reached heights previously unimaginable.

Anyway, that’s all going on. I’m fairly confident about most of my Finals – my marks so far for my French modules are fairly good and I’m well on track for a 2:1. Arabic, though, worries me, although I’ve pretty much come to the point where nothing I can do is going to change it. Que sera, sera, I think.

And for the last couple of months I’ve been rather distracted, anyway, by something. Or someone. *grin*

More news eventually, promise…

Potentially, when/if I remember, I have a few things to blog about… but that’ll come as it comes.

Anyhoo, my desk seems to be rather a mess at the moment, which ought to suggest I’m doing quite a bit. Alas, that’s not the case, but a guided tour of the mess seems to be an easy way to catalogue what I’m up to.

1 – Canadian Work Permit Application
I’m in the middle of applying for a Canadian work permit, to enable me to go and work in Quebec for a few months as soon as possible. With any luck, I should have the permit by the middle of May (I’m waiting for Nottinghamshire Police to confirm that I don’t have a criminal record…), and then I’ll be able to go and complete my year abroad in Canada. It’s been, to say the least, rather frustrating over the last few months, sitting around, knowing that I should and could be somewhere else improving my French and Arabic… but it looks like the wait is almost over.

2 – Microsoft Windows Vista
Yes. I upgraded to Vista when it was released at the end of January, having been using the beta and release candidate versions since last summer. It is a fairly funky overhaul of what we know as Windows – it looks pretty, even if it doesn’t necessarily add six years’ worth of missing features…

Anyway, Vista died on me last week, refusing to boot. So I formatted my hard drive and started again. Rather annoyingly, I’d deleted my backups about a fortnight ago, so I lost my work from between last Easter and now. Gah.

3 – Le Nouvel Observateur
Just because I’m at home, doesn’t mean I’m not keeping up with my French. Honest. We saw Mr Bean’s Holiday at the weekend, too – lots of French in that! (“La mer, qu’on voit danser le long des golfes clairs, à des reflets d’argent sous la pluie, la mer…“)

Also, just to join in with election fever… “Ségo, Ségo, Ségolène!” (she’s on the cover of the magazine…)

4 – Rushcliffe Borough Council Recycling2Go
I was bin-minding for some neighbours while they were on holiday, and their bin was not collected by the council. So I rang the council’s call centre, and they came and emptied the bin. True story.

5 – E.M. Forster’s Alexandria
Seeing as my essay on Alexandria was on the un-backed-up version of Windows, I lost it when I reinstalled Vista. So I’m writing it again. Typing in Arabic, at about one character every 30 seconds, is a very slow business…

6 – Mini Eggs
‘Cos it’s nearly Easter. Obviously.

7 – Sniffles
I think I’m coming down with / recovering from a cold. Meh.

8 – Theatre tickets
A group of us are going to see Avenue Q next Tuesday. I can promise that I’ll write something about it, but from past experiences, that’s unlikely to actually happen…

9 – Music
Music is good. For some reason, that small pile contains Wicked, Avenue Q, Little Shop of Horrors… and Bryan Adams. All of which are already on my computer (and backed up!), so I have no idea what the CDs are doing there.

Incidentally, on the right-hand monitor there is Twitteroo, a nice Windows-flavoured way of posting to Twitter. It’s the closest I could find to Twitterrific (for Macs), of which I am, frankly, rather jealous. And no, I still don’t really know what the point is of Twitter. Just that it’s strangely addictive.

The theme worked for the first 12 hours, but then I ran out of books. Which isn’t terribly useful. Perhaps I should plan better in advance…

Maybe next year I’ll find someone to blog with me. Sure, Skype and MSN keep you company in the wee small hours, but they’re no substitute for a real live person.

More energy-food-sort-of-stuff might be nice. I should have thought of that, really.

But I would definitely do it againn. I’m not too sure where I’ll be this time next year, but provisionally keep this date in your diaries!