2011 — 8 August: Monday
"Bother!", said Pooh. "That'll learn me."1 I was thinking on Saturday about how my earlier Asus PC-in-a-tiny-box would make a useful little internal web server and, this morning, my HP MPC Ubuntu 10.04 web server is now stubbornly refusing to reboot and resume serving duties. Typical Monday morning start to the unworking week.
After last night's thunder the sun is again in evidence. Time for breakfast. How did it get to be 09:33 already?
It never rains, but...
... it does seem to pour from time to time. For example, I have three lads with long metal tools doing some mysterious valve clearing in a bit of the waterworks on "my" bit of pavement. And Mike was planning to hot-foot (wheel) round in a few minutes to pick up my now spare wireless router to try to diagnose his post-thunder lack of connectivity, but he's been able to pick one up from his chum Andrew. (Mind you, that now leaves chum without, as it were.)
Meanwhile, just as I was resetting2 a variety of browsers to point to a "localhost" server (also spare) that I run as a service on the Gateway XP box, my recalcitrant Ubuntu server has kicked back into apparently normal life on the third re-boot. Go figure.
My lovely little Tablet PC ticks smoothly and unfussily on, once again fully-charged. I estimate I got a little over 12 hours use from the initial charge yesterday, and it was "down" to 14% and starting to tell me it was hungry last thing last night. Not bad at all. The tablet's battery actually recharges itself from the keyboard/dock battery whenever it gets a chance, but they do both run out eventually of course.
Then I briefly lost my Internet connection. Time (11:44) for another cuppa, obviously. Followed by a burst of food shopping.
If you look closely...
... you'll deduce I've just lost one of my monthly reasons to nip into a newsagent:
September appears to be so early this month that they didn't have time to find an apostrophe.
Never knowingly...
... defrauded. The chaps I spend most of my pension pittance with (feeding myself) each month rang me a few minutes ago. They were dreadfully worried, having spotted a 99p Internet transaction on my card yesterday.
This was actually me buying my first piece of Android software: a file transfer app for the Tablet from — as it happened — an American software house, and using Google Checkout. How were they to know that? Still, it shows they're on the ball. Doubtless many fraudulent activities kick off by the bad guys making an initial small transaction in hopes that a) the account is viable, and b) the owner isn't too alert.
Said Tablet, by the way, also makes both an excellent e-book reader and MP3 player. I could get seriously attached to it. This after months, if not years, spent sneering at Junior's ever more sophisticated mobile phones. He currently uses an Android device of some sort though he may well have bought himself an iPad2 by now, if I know my son.
Just back (ahead of some fairly fierce-looking clouds) from getting some juice with which to pamper its touch screen and remove my finger marks. This has always been a problem with touch technology, of course. Mind you, I could do with smaller fingertips, too. But how did it become 17:05 already?
While I wouldn't...
... necessarily characterise my post-Christa style of culinary experimentation as "fun", exactly, the fact remains that my decision to let the crockpot device cool its heels during the summer months has been forcing me down some slightly more creative paths. Tonight, for example, I finally exhumed the oldest remaining Lidl can of fish and chopped veggies I could find (I scoff these days at the idea of worrying about something labelled "Best before 12/2009"), heated the contents3 and dumped it out on to a bed of toast. Yummy.
Besides, the worse it tastes, the more the "Daddy biscuit" reward for good behaviour then shines by comparison.