My computer is all better now. Basically, something in the screen had broken, so that after a few minutes the screen went so dark you could barely see anything on it. And when it wasn't dark it was a bit red (my old computer, on the other hand, has had a distinctly red screen for years now). Luckily, it is still under warranty, so I spent three hours on the phone on Wednesday night to Dell technical support, trying to get them to send an engineer out.

If you've never had to phone them up before you're lucky. They've moved their call centre to India, so you get to speak to people who know less about computers than I do and incidentally, don't understand a word you say. 30 minutes of that three hours was spent trying to give her my address. I've rung them before and they've either just made the problem worse, or just told me to reinstall Windows and not really cared about trying anything else. They do have a tendency to try and get you to go to a website as well, which is a bit tricky when your computer doesn't work. I only ring them as an absolute last resort.

Anyway, the engineer was great, fixed it in 10 minutes. Now my screen looks a bit blue - that could just be because it was a bit red before Wednesday and I had got used to it. It's also very clean, which, strangely, is making everything look quite textured. Dell do two types of laptops, Inspiron and Latitude. The engineer told me that Inpsiron is dealt with by the Indians, but Latitudes are dealt with by the Irish. I've spoken to them many years ago before the Indians even existed (you know what I mean) and you can't understand a word they say, but they're very helpful.

Possibly all the stress of that, and work, and not sleeping has got to me. Friday night I very nearly went to bed at 7.30pm. Saturday morning I got up to go to the ZZ9 AGM in Nottingham, fell over half the stuff on my floor because I was dizzy, and went back to bed instead. I impressed myself last night by staying up till 9pm. I also have the office cold, so I am wondering if it's just me being more tired than usual, or whether I have flu (despite having had the flu jab).

In slightly more exciting news, I am rec'ing Lord of the Rings on Crack Van for December. I've managed to get my recs list down to the maximum allowed, which was hard enough. I was feeling quite accomplished until I realised I need to work out what to say as well. But as I'll not be posting any of them until Friday (I'm busy on the 1st), I'll worry about it later I think.