lemon garden

Excuse me while I blow the dust off this weblog, it’s been a while since I last posted.

There is no excuse for my silence, I have simply been too busy for inspiration to take hold.

The week before last was spent learning about ASP.Net on a course in Leeds. The course was way too slow moving for my tastes. I spent half the time looking through the Astronomy Picture of the Day archives instead - one ear tuned to the tutor so I could perk up if anything interesting was said. Still, the company running the course did provide a tasty hot meal every lunchtime, so the week was not completely wasted.

Since then I have been so snowed under with work that I barely manage to struggle out from beneath the snowdrifts every night to go home. I’ll be glad when Christmas arrives and I can get a week off, holed up on the coast with family. There are few finer things in life than to walk along an empty beach on Christmas morning looking out over the wild North Sea.

In other news, my home computer seems to be on its last legs. It is a venerable old machine - a good seven years old. I like to get my money’s worth out of these things. I’m running a pretty minimalist Linux set up, so I can get a lot of mileage out of an older PC. However, the clock on the motherboard died a while ago and now the USB bus seems to have gone too. One of my two hard disks is also getting a slow build up of errors. It’s a good thing I’ve got plenty of backups. I’m beginning to suspect it is getting beyond the stage where even a man of my talents can keep the poor machine going.

I’m thinking of getting a Mac Mini. Just because I like the idea of having a small, pretty, shiny box on my desk rather than a great big ugly beige thing. And, much as I like Linux, it would be nice to have a computer that just works without requiring lots of tinkering and tweaking.

My car is in for a service tomorrow. Ugh. Sometimes, I wish car manufacturers would stop wasting their time on irrelevant things like powerful engines, satellite navigation, etc. Instead, they should built a car with parts that work efficiently for an awful long time without any need for expensive servicing. That would be both a great service to humanity and to my wallet.

Speaking of astronomical pictures, aren’t there a lot of galaxies in this picture? It’s a big old universe out there.