That long-coveted, long needed replacement laptop is mine. After a day of humming and hawing, I bought a Compaq Presario from PC World.

All I’ve had time for tonight is delousing it — removing all the Norton, AOL and other unnecessary crap, including some program that actually spoke to me (“Hi – I’m here to connect you to the internet!” – shades of Mr Foster, it’s time for your upgrade!). All unnecessary. Connecting to the internet just needs me to correctly key in my wireless router cipher, something that takes more attempts than it should. Why does the Windows doubrey insist on you typing all 25 characters in twice? Mad.
I have also installed the essential progs — AVG first, then Firefox, then, er, Sid Meier’s Civ IV. (New machine carefully specced so that it had enough oomph to play the new version)
No more time for now. No time to record fragments of Ulysses for LV, no time to type up the minutes of tonight’s meeting. No time to actually play Civ.

And the weekend — we’re going straight from work to an enormous cottage in the Peak district where a superbly organised friend has marshalled 14 university friends to be in the same place at the same time. So it would be rude to play with my new computer. Wouldn’t it? Yes, definitely. Um…. Maybe… just in the evenings…?

NO!

Laptop definitely didn’t like the half glas of Australian shiraz it inadvertently took in last night.

I powered it down immediately and tissued off the worst, but I was somewhat surprised to find when I put it in my bag first thing this morning that some of the wine had made it right through the keyboard onto the desk underneath.

All the right hand keyboard keys are sticking and the and mouse buttons are slugglish.

I popped into PC World looking for a card-reader (an ill-advised office tidying bonanza at work has predictably deprived us of our camara cable) and scoped laptops while they were in there.

It seems the trend has moved away from what some call clit-pointers — PCW only stock laptops with touch pads.  Can one do intensive DTP for a day using one of those, or will I need to carry a mouse around with me?

I’ve upgraded my account with Dataflame to give me a lot more space to host files when I make Librivox recordings.

The first four files of the Invisible Man are uploading now.

But a side effect of the upgrade is I am entitled to a second MySQL database on my website, rather than limited to the single one that sits behind in the background running the WordPress program that is this blog.

What shall I do with this unexpected richness of databases?

Something exciting and technological?  I could have my own wiki!  But I don’t know what I would use it for.  I could have a third blog (after this one and the blogger-based, sometimes fragile Jokes blog that receives all the e-mailed funnies I forward.)  I could set up a council blog or a ward blog aimed at constituents rather than my immediate circle of friends.  I could have a trial run to see whether I could make WordPress run www.gaynottingham.co.uk — a website I’ve neglected for a long time now.

Hmmm.  Think I’ll sleep on it.

My home computer (a dead cheap Acer from eBuyer) has died again, which is very annoying. It had a couple of total freezes, where the screen shows what it was doing when it died hours later, but the system won’t respond to mouse moves or the three-fingered salute.

The last time I turned it off after one of those, it wouldn’t come back on at all. Hit the power button, and the fan goes into overdrive. Normally, the fan started in overdrive for a few seconds then went quiet whilst POST and booting happened.

Now, nothing. Fan on high, nothing further. No disk activity noise, nothing on the screen.

This did happen last summer during my French holiday. The machine just randomly started working again after a few days. So, here’s hoping. I’m not sure I can be bothered to strip it down to bare essential components in an attempt to find the point of failure.

We were pleasantly surprised the other week when we found that googling a film title gave you easy to read information on when it was showing nearby.

Now we find Google can tell you all that, and a whole lot more, by text message too. See http://www.google.co.uk/sms for more information. Now you don’t have to text me when you’re stuck in a pub quiz, you can go straight to the horse’s mouth.

I tested it with the last q to arrive by text for those purposes, and it doesn’t appear that Google SMS knows who the transvestite in the Rocky Horror Show is after all. Maybe you’ll still have to text me.

Stumbled across the information about the SMS service whilst trying to find out if I could do something else easily / cheaply. I have now, thanks to eBay, got a sat nav GPS system for my mobile phone (Navicore). It has the capability of being a beacon, in a limited way — you can configure it to send a text message containing your co-ordinates at an interval you specify. It doesn’t appear to be able to send e-mails with the same information, which would be much more useful.

I was wondering if I could find something simple (hah!) that could receive text messages then plot where you’ve been on a map. Maybe even in real time over the internet. Then people wouldn’t have to text me to know where I was and what time I’d make it into the office. They’d know I was “stuck in traffic on the M1” (and not, in any way, still in bed).

Google Earth Plus seems to be able to take in GPS data, like a list of waypoints. I’m just not sure how I can get the text messages onto a computer without spending huge sums of money doing it.

This looks like it might be halfway there. I’m not sure my coding is up to it, and what’s Zope?

In the normal run of things, I don’t do a huge amount of travelling. There’s a finite amount of places I could be. It would have been far more interesting to have plotted my movements around France earlier in the year, for example.

I’ve now been using MyBlogLog for barely a day and I’m already puzzled at how and why people come here.

In particular, it looks like some people have asked questions of Google, and come to me looking for answers, which they won’t have found. This feels frustrating. People have come to me in their hour of need and left empty handed. As a public service, here are the answers they should have had:

• “What to do with jam-jars”

Easy answer to that one. Sterlise them with boiling water, or in a dishwasher. Put them in the oven GasMark 1 whilst making jam. Then, er, fill them with jam.

• “No pressure in my homebrew”

Oh dear. I guess that means one of two things: either your pressure barrel isn’t airtight (did you remember to grease the seal?) or your homebrew isn’t fermenting. Which means it’s not, strictly speaking, homebrew.

This reminds me that half of the barrel of beer I made nearly a year ago is still sitting undrunk and probably undrinkable in the cellar. And there’s no cellar in the new house. Can I make beer in the shed? Where will the wine go?

• “long time no mail”

Oh dear. One of those dilemmas. Is there a technical problem or do your friends suddenly now hate you? Here’s some things you could try: Phone your friends and check for frostiness on the line. Check your e-mail using a different mail program (eg PopTray or SMB) or the website www.mailreader.com to see if your account at your ISP looks the same as it does in your regular program. Check your ISP’s service log to see if there was an outage on your mail server. If you run your own domain, have you done something stupid to your MX table?

• “civilization iii serial three hour”

Actually mate, you’re probably better off not finding that serial number. Just think how much of your time Civ will waste when you do actually get it running.

Can’t leave without mentioning:

• The aforementioned “barrister strike blog”

Although we were talking about this in the pub last night, there’s nothing here specifically about that. Yes, it’s a blog. Yes, I mention the word strike occasionally. But the only previous mention of barrister before I got intrigued about my google hits was talking about the Lib Dem candidate in the Hartlepool by-election. And this despite having a good friend and former housemate who is one.

Just a few tech things that have changed around here over the previous few days.

• New, buttony-goodness now in the links section. With thanks to a dead handy website that can make those distinctive 80×15 buttons on the fly.
• New technology from MyBlogLog a utility with a free option that tracks what people click on and where they come from. (Why on earth did my site come up when someone was googling “barrister strike blog”? Creepy: we were only talking about that last night…)
• Google Adsense is back on my blog. I only initially installed it because I was intrigued to see what the robots would choose to advertise on my page, and that has been interesting. The programme is now earning me a healthy $2 a month, which is, of course, far less than the $3 a day EU cows earn. Many thanks to all those of you who choose to click.
• I’ve finally got around to Geotagging this site. You can see my ‘meatspace neighbours’ by clicking here. And you can automatically see Geo-aware sites with this useful Firefox plugin