Tangled Mind

Dear Lazyweb
I am looking at services that convert voicemail to email. Any recommendations from personal experience?
edit: voicemail left on landline not mobile

Dear British Readers
I'm trying to come up with fun and unusual alternatives, ideally with a London / Estuary feel, for 'like moths to a flame' and 'all over him like a cheap suit'. Ideas?
(Normally I'd just let this ferment in the back of my head but I want to free up the brainspace for something else!)

so, yesterday's half-day of Access databasing was actually quite fun, and I ticked off almost all of their wishes and did a lot of cleaning up (legacy database maintained by people without database skillz).

Access types, can you help?
They want to be able to add records into the (Access 2003) database via an external, intranet page. I poked around at Data Access Pages (which I've not used) but results were inconclusive. Any solutions, pointers, suggestions? It's a 'nice to have' rather than a requirement, so I'm not going to put too much effort into it, but if there's a relatively quick and painless way of doing it that would be great.

offline for rest of afternoon -- they don't want me back til Monday morning -- so am treating myself to swim and Inception, yes, again.

[sent home from jury service til afternoon session, so am availing myself of the lovely bugshaw's laptop, on which she has set me up.]

Okay: dead laptop, dead PDA, slow and grudgeful EEE ...

1. I am going to uninstall Windoze on the EEE, and (re)install Linux. I have external drives aplenty but no CD drive. Can anyone point me at an easy how-to (especially, at what stage do I remove Windoze and how?) BEER for any Cambridge person who's prepared to do this for me, ideally in the next few days!

2. If anyone has a Palm T3/T5/TX that they would like to sell me for £30 or less, speak now!

3. Am about to phone Dell and see if there is an alternative to on-site service -- otherwise I'll have to pend laptop until after jury service.

Thanks in advance!

Ok, so imagine that I have an HTML image map and I want to have the links clickable only on or after certain dates. (Yep: Advent calendar!) Is there a nice quick easy Javascript way of doing this? My google-fu and /or my brain are not asking the right questions. And I am running out of coding time ...

(Logic basically: IF TODAY > X THEN LINK = Something Useful ELSE LINK = Stay Put)

Edit: I know how to use the date functions in Javascript and I know how to check the current date against a number. What I don't know is how to make the link dependent on the result.

Further edit: no more LJ til late this evening ...

Does anyone have a copy of The King Must Die that I could borrow? Mine's in a box in Sawston ...

My google-fu is failing me on this, but AKICOLJ ...

The problem:
- I am checking pages which include non-standard characters (e.g. quotations in Greek, names in Turkish, mathematical functions, astronomical symbols etc.)
- These characters are coded as Unicode Hexadecimal NCRs, e.g. Tòν is coded as Tòν
- All Unicode characters must be supported in Verdana

My current modus operandi:
- for each character, do a copy-paste-find on this page of supported characters
- or for slightly longer texts, get the NCRs converted via this copy-paste conversion utility, and look at included/excluded ranges on the page of supported characters

What I really really want:
- a website (nothing downloadable) where I can:
--- copy the non-standard text (or, failing that, the HTML code with the NCRs)
--- paste it into a text box
--- specify 'show me this in Verdana'
--- be alerted to (or at least be able to see) which characters are supported and which are not.

Alternatively
- point out the bleedin' obvious solution which I am missing!

Answers to all and any gratefully received!

( Amazon, microtome, Jean-Paul Sartre, HSBC, cycling, handbags, mendacity, IE7 ... )

Can anyone recommend a decent dentist -- NHS -- in or near Cambridge?

I am not keen on dentists but even less keen on PAIN.

1. It's autumn, all right. I do actually like early autumn a great deal -- something about the light -- but I prefer to have summer immediately prior.

2. It's getting chilly, especially after ridiculously early nightfall. I put the heating on last night. (Shiva very happy.)

3. Via woolymonkey, what the Romans may have done for us -- messed up potential HIV resistance in the Roman Empire. Possibly using cats.

4. Chrome v. flashy and pretty fast (I'm not noticing slowness, anyway) but there are some oddities. Like scrolling-and-selecting, which doesn't behave as I'd expect (i.e. usefully) and has a nasty tendency to select random stuff from elsewhere on the page.

5. In other browser news, there is a new version of Flock. This one logs me out, randomly, from LJ several times a day. STOPPIT.

6. Skool hols are over in the borough! My lunchtime swim was oddly peaceful, and it took me a while to work out why.

7. I am trying to have a very productive week (and succeeding in several areas) but prolonged typing still makes my left thumb-joint hurt. A lot.

8. Off to Kew this evening to celebrate my friend M's birthday and bitch about her sister.

9. Have been flicking through online reviews of Stephenie* Meyer's The Host. Am dismayed to see so many Amazon (and other) reviewers hailing the brilliant prose, originality of concept, depth of characterisation: also, phrases like "the first love triangle involving only two bodies" (manifest bollocks) and "SF is downplayed in favor of more thought-provoking issues like the resiliency of humanity, overcoming cultural barriers, interspecies prejudice, and so forth". [FX: toothgrinding]. I did enjoy the book, but not for the aforementioned virtues.

10. Post-conversation with major_clanger t'other day, does anyone have useful resources about communes / communities set up in the late 1940s by ex-servicemen? I was intrigued to note that Othona, at Bradwell (next to St Cedd's chapel, built ~650AD from the bricks of the Roman fort), was set up in 1946 by an ex-RAF chaplain.

I have been spelling it wrong all this time: there is no 'a'