I've not been home for a whole day and I've finished all the computers stuff. Yesterday I was at home by 10.30 - the quiet roads made leaving at dawn worth it. So then we installed Linux Mint on my old netbook before lunch. After lunch we cloned the hard drive on my netbook, so now I have one that's exactly the same but without errors. And then yesterday and today I fixed the things in WP I wanted to fix and finished customising the CSS for the comment pages in LJ.

All just in time for the Yuletide archive to open, so now I need to read it, while watching my sister play Lego Pirates of the Caribbean. And write my fandom stocking fics.

We also did presents. I read the new Simon's Cat book in bed this morning because I woke up early and now I've started Lis Sladen's autobiography. Dad's reading Gin O'Clock (which was also my present).

This morning I had a massive excel file I needed to run one macro on. It should have been a case of setting it off on the super computer and coming back when it was finished ten minutes later. Instead it took two hours and involved me running it multiple times when it crashed, opening and closing excel multiple times when it refused to save, and copying out bits of the file when it refused to do anything.

And then my netbook refused to boot into Ubuntu. Fortunately it's a problem I've had before and did actually take ten minutes to fix, rather than the two hours it took the first time.

Don't you just love computers?

Lots of people online talking about ebook readers makes me want one. Well, I wanted one ever since livii showed me hers and even more so when Dad bought one and I read And Another Thing... on it. Since then they've gone down in price. But not enough. If it came with all the books I have on my shelves on it automatically, I'd buy it at the current price. Sadly, that's not going to happen. If it was £50 I'd buy one, but the cover and light is £50...

Technically speaking, there's nothing to stop me. I have the money, I just have more important things to spend it on. The main reason I haven't bought one is... I don't need one. I have a pile of books that I ought to read and an ebook reader isn't going to help with that. I rarely buy new books and you can't really get second hand ebooks... So basically I'd just use it for borrowing ebooks from the library and sticking pdfs on.

And then there's the problem of where/when I'd read it. I wouldn't take it to work because I'd get the piss taken out of me. Although it would help for the times when I don't want to take a book to work to read at lunchtime because I'd have the piss taken out of me. I wouldn't read it on the train, or anywhere public in case it got nicked. So I could read it at home, but you can't read it in the mornings in bed because it's too cold. About the one thing it is useful for is reading while you're eating because you don't have to hold the page open.

So in conclusion, I don't need an ebook reader. I wouldn't use it enough to justify the cost.

I also want an all-in-one computer - I played with them in PC World the other week. They're really heavy, but so cool. Well, ok, the cool part is the part where you touch the screen instead of using the mouse. Which is handy for solitaire. And probably surfing, but less useful for typing. Not least because you'd have to sit really close to the monitor to touch it, but then you're too close to it to see properly because it's so big. It's utterly impractical, but very cool. Needless to say, I don't need one. I already have two computers and I definitely don't have space for another one. But they're cool and I want one.

The one thing I don't want is an iPad. I did, until I played with one in PC World and it was exciting for the first ten minutes, then I got bored.

This evening I thought I'd have a relaxed evening, get some stuff done, maybe have an early night, for a change. But so far all I've managed to do is have dinner and spend £500. And dinner required me to cook the chips twice because, due to more than one thing, managed to make one side of them completely black. And I mean completely.

And after, my computer decided that I didn't really need to see the screen any more... After spending some time in Safe Mode, we established the graphics card is going. At the moment I have lots of coloured lines on the screen and I am copying my files from that computer to my little laptop.

I have a new one on order now, which will have Vista, unfortunately. I still can't find anything in XP because they changed the file system from 98, so I'm just going to be even more lost. And the resolution isn't going to be as big as on my old one.

So now I get to play on the little laptop (so glad I have two, although I can also use my work laptop), see if I can get my friend to get my stuff off my hard drive. And see if I can get a long weekend off in a couple of weeks to go home and install everything. And get all the stuff off my last backup (which, as it wasn't the instant before the screen went, isn't recent enough).

So my computer might have been slow and full of junk that I've been meaning to delete for years, but I liked it.

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Originally uploaded by paranoidangel

This is what I've spent most of my past week on (apart from looking at houses): the little blue laptop. I've photographed it on top of my current one to show the size difference. My computer is 15.4", the laptop is 8.9" (I know they're both laptops but I have to call them both something different). It has Linux on it (Linpus, to be precise) so I've spent a lot of time on the forums trying to work out how to do stuff. It's a lot like Unix, so some of it is coming back to me.

Biggest pain in the arse so far is my TV. When I plug my computer into it I set it to PC and it shows me a picture. That doesn't work with the laptop, but it turns out what you're supposed to do, is cycle through the options that let you watch two channels at once until you get to PC. At which point it'll show you the picture at 640x480, no matter which computer you plug into it. Which is not helpful, since it only shows you a corner of the screen. Useful.

This evening I've enjoyed watching the diving and swimming. Now there's some horses running and jumping. I don't know how they get the horses to do that - in my experience horses generally do exactly what they want. It is quite amusing that when they fall off the horses carry on.

It's annoying that all the tennis has been on during the day when I'm at work. Although it is something that's harder to show highlights of, as opposed to swimming, where a race might only last a minute. And the fencing highlights really are highlights, ie bits of fights. With the results listed on the right of the video. So I'll live without seeing the stuff in the week, and concentrate on watching the fencing this weekend.

Tonight I bought myself a new laptop! It's the Acer Aspire One, which they promised would be available in red, but it turns out my choices are white and blue. So I picked blue. Although it isn't out till next Monday because I wanted one with 1Gb RAM (rather than 512Mb) with Linux. I ordered myself a wireless keyboard with a touchpad, so I can plug the baby laptop (it weighs just over 1kg) into the 26inch TV and type on a laptop-size keyboard, while sitting on the sofa.