Further ramblings of a self-made pauper

Stage one of our experiment has commenced.

Furtle's phone is currently not well. It is hors de combat as it were, being a casualty of alcohol-related shenanigans last night. Tut tut, dear me.

I did my best to clean it last night and it spent all night and most of today reduced to as many separate parts as I can manage without voiding the warranty in the hope that it dries out properly. The battery is fully charged and when assembled it can be turned on and used to answer phone calls with the flip. Anything more proactive seems to be beyond it right now and any pressure on the keypad causes it to switch itself back off. We cannot get at the two text messages we know are there.

I am hoping that this is a function of remaining moisture trapped under the keypad shorting it out when we try to use it. To this end, the phone is disassembled again and the bits are residing in a sealed plastic bag along with two silica gel packs. It will stay there until tomorrow morning when I hope that it will all work spiffingly again. I am encouraged along these lines by the fact that handset functionality has increasingly, if erratically improved all day.

The damned thing being on Orange means that we cannot put the sim into any of my redundant handsets as they would need specially unlocking. Ah well, we'll see.

In taking my mind off other matters, I am torturing my grey cells with other, less important items.

I continue to be plagued by indecision, which I flatter myself is an uncharacteristic trait. I've mentioned before that my hi-fi system is acting up and my DVD player is becoming more erratic. At the same time, the TV is showing signs of age, though I have decided that it will last me until I am sure that I can get a decent digital signal wherever I live and that's certainly not true where I am at the moment. The digital signal is, to put it kindly, variable, so I refuse to dispense shekels on an all-singing, all-dancing TV until I am sure that I shall get my money's worth from it. Plus the longer I leave it, the cheaper they become.

That leaves me with the hi-fi – in particular the CD player – and the DVD player. I can solve the former by taking advantage of a kind offer from rumfuddle, though that will be a midi system rather than a mini. This leaves me with the DVD conundrum. I don’t think that at this stage I want a DVD/HDD machine for the same reason that I am prepared to wait before buying a new telly; I want my money’s worth from the machine via digital broadcasts. What I do want is something region-free (not difficult to get these days as bibliogirl pointed out), but I have decided that it must also have DivX playback capability and that complicates the issue. I have seen a nice one on Play.com that may well fit the bill. The problem is, I should rather like one of these:

Freecom Network Mediaplayer
Freecom Network Mediaplayer 3.5" 320Gb

This little beast would allow me to stream downloaded movies and music direct to my (or anyone else's TV or hi-fi. It's an awful lot more expensive than a new DVD player, mind and doesn't really get rid of the need for a new one at some point.

Oh, decisions, decisions.

One arrived back at the Athenaeum Club after a hard day's running the country, to find the inestimable colonel_maxim in something of a lather.

It seems that someone from his friends' list had gone one better than the steampunk keyboard. Sadly, one does not have access to that journal, but rarely does Google let one down in times of extremis. I therefore present the steampunk computer



And as it says on the chap's site, ( the obligatory sepia shot )

Fantastic.

Twenty quid has just bought me a wireless mouse and keyboard, which together make the lappie so much more accessible for everyday use. I think that once I get the PC up and running again, I shall transfer these to that - the old keyboard is rather smeggy after all the years' use it's given me and the tracker ball needs cleaning every ten minutes or so.

A full keyboard is far, far more comfortable for typing than the keyboard on the lappie itself, which of course, is designed for travel.

This keyboard has a whole wad of extra buttons too, both for media applications and for web browsing. I wonder if these are available on most new keyboards and I have just been missing out, using the ancient gunge-covered thing on my desk?

One thing hasn't changed, though. My typing is still rubbish.

Beddy-byes for Bryan shortly, I think. I had intended to go a bit earlier, but I have spent a large part of this evening flummoxed by technology and time passed to the extent that I didn't have dinner until close on eleven this evening, so I decided that maybe I'd wait a while before creeping under the duvet.

Webcams, see. Pain the arse. I don't even want to use it as a webcam; I want to use the inbuilt microphone to talk on Skype. It's done it before, but it refuses to work now. Admittedly I can't remember which of the jack sockets I used last time, but there's only four of the buggers and none seem to do the trick any more. Why it can't just send everything down the bloody USB port is beyond me.

Oh well.

As for the rest of today, well a bit of a wash out, thanks for asking. I slept badly last night on account of the cough - or rather I slept well but spasmodically, so when the alarm went off at 7.30 this morning, I woke up, yawned and then wondered why the radio had gone quiet. Well that would be because between switching the phone alarm off, the radio alarm coming on and me yawning, a time displacement that would have had Mulder wetting himself occurred. Between the start of the yawn and the end of it, a mere 75 minutes passed and suddenly I was late.

Late, I should add, for work, not as in the Late Bryan Lea. I realise that typing that out is a little redundant, but well, that bloke at the back - you know who I mean - well, he is a bit slow. I spent far too much of the day trying to find very simple words to explain a very complex thing to a very stupid person. It was very wearing.

Ironic, then, that I should be so awake now at the fag end of the day.

colonel_maxim and ruletwo are in Tallinn tonight. Capital of sunny Estonia. I have the Athenaeum Club to myself until Friday evening.

True to form, I have nothing planned to take advantage of this opportunity. I may have a G&T to see the night off.

That's it, folks.

The office intarweb connection is positively arthritic today. Someone must have tried e-mailing the Encyclopaedia Britannica and inevitably it got wedged in the server.

It’s times like this that I hanker for times past, before we had an outside connection (only 10 years ago); we knew no better and things like endlessly failing connections and limited access were of no importance. As it is, it’s like looking at the world through very dark glasses.

That said, there are signs that the Encyclopaedia Britannica may have passed through the system like the biggest log on the planet. The server shows signs of life, Boris, signs of life!

It lives! It lives!

As you were, everybody.

This sort of entry is what happens when circumstances change halfway through typing it up.