The most stressful things I have ever done are: Proposing to my wife, Getting married, Buying a house.

I had so many people tell me it was going to be so stressful and horrible, and I was like "oh, I can imagine". Well, you can't. It's the second worst process I've ever gone through (the worst thing is something I can't talk about on a public blog). From putting together offers (and having to sign/resign and fax back and forth), applying for a mortgage (and having to fax them evidence etc) and home inspections and blah blah blah. It's just really painful and was complicated by the fact that I flew off on vacation the minute we had our offer accepted, leaving my wife holding the reins. During the peak busy period at her work.

The latest crazy show that has taken our interest is Man Vs. Wild. It's a simple premise: Survival expert Bear Grylls (and that IS is his real name) is dropped into one of nature's many hostile environments and has to survive unaided until he can get back to civilization. Highlights so far have seen him eating ants, drinking the water squeezed out of elephant dung and pissing on his own T-shirt so he can use it to keep cool.

Apart from the ludicrous parts such as above, he does show some useful things if you ever were to get lost, such as building rafts and shelter etc. But the main reason the show works is that he's just a personable bloke, and for an ex-SAS soldier he's not the typical gruff bastard you see on these kind of things,which helps, as he's more like just a normal bloke trying to survive than some superman. He has the enthusiasm for what he's doing that someone like Steve Irwin had, but without getting over the top and annoying.

I asked for either this or Gears of War for Christmas, and got this - and glad I did cos its one of the best games I have ever played. Maybe being a huge comics fan helps, as half the fun of the game is the fact that you get to play as like 20 different superheroes (Wolverine, Spider-Man, Daredevil, Thor, Iron Man...etc.) against dozens of the famous Marvel supervillains (Doctor Doom, Galactus, Super Skrull, Loki...etc.) But on top of that, the gameplay is responsive, fun, long-lasting, with lots of replay value with things to unlock (like extra characters).

In celebration of getting a promotion at work, I decided to splurge and get a Tivo. We have been thinking about getting one for ages, as once we are done with work and dinner, we normally only have from like 8-10 to watch TV and if nothing's on during that time we end up watching crap that we never wanted to. If this is you, get Tivo now.

Seriously, I've only had it a week and I love it. Being able to watch movies that were on at 1am the night before whenever you want, or watch the episode of the Simpsons that was on while I was driving home etc, without even having to do much programming on it. Basically you set shows that you want it to record regularly, and you can rate shows that are on by hitting a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" button, and it is pretty smart once you tell it the shows you like - a bit like Amazon's suggestions, recording things automatically based on what I have already recorded.

OK, I give up. The spammers have won for now, and I am blocking all comments unless from a registered user. I tried a spam filter and it didn't work, I tried having unregistered users comments be moderated, but today I have 62 pages of comments to sift through... so until I can come up with a better method, you will have to register to leave comments I'm afraid.

Bastards.

EDIT: Maybe I will win in the end, I have found a better anti-spam module for Drupal and will see how good it is - but for now, comments will remain off limits

Over Christmas I have seen quite a few movies, and can't be bothered to review them all. So here's the quick versions:

• Night at the Museum : Surprisingly good, but basically a kid's film, it's like a funnier Jumanji. With Ricky Gervais in it - who as always is just himself, but bloody funny.
• My Super-Ex Girlfriend : Really fucking bad.
• Beerfest : Really fucking funny.
• Talledaga Nights : Alright, much worse than I thought it would be - nowhere near as good as Anchorman.
• Clerks 2 : Bad. Like Episode One bad, going back and revisiting something that used to be good, but just goes through the motions. Clerks 2 has the same level of dick and fart jokes, but none of the charm of the original - it's amusing in pieces but the once-clever Star Wars in-jokes and references have been replaced by not that funny jokes about Lord of the Rings that make the characters look old and bitter, and not witty and hip anymore.
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This must be one of the best kept secrets on the web, but if you register at www.napster.com just by putting in your email address, no credit card, no subscription - you can listen to any music you want for free through their website. The only restrictions are you cant download or burn the music, and you can only listen to each track up to 3 times. But for FREE, and they have 1000s of songs including most new stuff, so you can listen to new albums in full and see if you like them.

Check it out. The first song I listened to on it was
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I was all excited to have been able to get free tickets online to a special cinema screening of this week's "fall finale" of Battlestar Galactica.

I was slightly less excited when Google Maps decided to give me two incorrect street names for my directions, causing me to take wrong turns for several miles in rush hour traffic.

And no, I didnt get there in time to watch the screening.

Bastards.

As the few TV shows I am currently watching have (mostly) gone into midseason breaks, I decided to try a show I had previously skipped: Jericho.

A nuclear explosion occurs in Denver, visible from the small town of Jericho. Communications are lost and the power is cut off, nobody knows what has happened - is it an accident? Terrorism? War? Gradually (very gradually) we learn more about what has happened as the inhabitants of Jericho struggle to understand what has happened and how they will survive the new, changed, world they are living in.

When the time came to reinstall Windows on my desktop PC a couple of months ago, I couldn't find my serial numbers for Microsoft Office. After trying the free download of Office 2007 Beta for a few weeks and finding it overcomplicated and needlessly altered, I suddenly remembered the open source alternative OpenOffice.

I had never tried it, but had always heard the name of it come up in discussions about MS Office, especially on Digg. It's basically a free, slightly cut-down version of Office. You get 6 programs, roughly corresponding to Word, Excel, Access, Powerpoint, Visio and ur... a Maths Formula program. And guess what: It's great! While it's missing a lot of the more advanced features, that's in some ways a bonus as it means everything is easier to use and less cluttered. It works well with existing Office documents and will save in Office format too, so you don't have to send stuff to people in a wierd format.