I spent a lovely 3 weeks with my girlfriend, doing work at her flat during the day.
Working at home in a different timezone has its advantages and disadvantages, but for developing really complex modules without getting distracted, and upon reflecting upon what one’s doing, it’s really great.
My laptop bag’s really rubbish. It has a habit of falling over in unexpected ways. (But I bought it for about €150 at Harrods so I expected it to be really good. I suppose one should never buy the cheapest of a set of products, even if the cheapest is still really expensive.)
By falling over in unexpected ways, I mean it’s like one of those objects one studies in Applied Mathematics like Weebles which just don’t do what one expects. So I placed it propped against a wall on a shelf at 30 degrees to the vertical, and it promptly fell over in the other direction, i.e. rotated 120 degrees including going through being vertical. But the shelf not being the floor meant the bag then fell off the shelf onto the floor, dropping about 50cm.
Laptop was completely unscratched. Anyone who knows me know how much care I take of my laptop, and despite being over 15 months old, and having been taken daily to all manner of different offices, having been in Thailand, Italy, Macau, Hong Kong, China, Dubai, Doha, UK and used as my main computer more or less every day of those 15 months, still gets comments that it looks essentially new and unused. So you can imagine my joy at seeing the fact that fall didn’t scratch it.
However, the laptop now no longer works. I would say, from the sound it makes (or rather doesn’t make) that the hard disk isn’t spinning up.
Amazingly I actually have a warranty for the computer. I took more than the minimum duration, and choose the more expensive they-collect as opposed to the default you-send-to-base; this can only be a sign of my feeling of decadence at the time I bought the laptop (the fact I opted for a €100 upgrade of blue reflective paint on the lid, which one can hardly see, and bought the matching leather Vaio bag, which I never use, being others).
And my Chello internet at home doesn’t work. I think the cable modem’s broken. It wouldn’t be the first time (nor probably the last). So despite having two computers (home mac and laptop) and two internet connections (Chello and UTMS for the notebook) with the explicit goal of never being without a computer and internet, I’m writing this from an internet cafe.
