It's All Gone A Bit Pete Tong

Friday couldn't come soon enough for me this week; I've had a real stinker due to countless gadgets around me failing.  Technology is a wonderful thing until it stops working, then you find yourself impotent and powerless, especially if you've come to rely on it to the levels that I, and most of my kind, have.

I think my run of bad luck started at 0620 on Saturday morning when I accidentally put my hand through a picture frame, but the less said about that incident the better... suffice to say that my Colin Prior print of An Teallach looks slightly less majestic now.

Saturday evening, for no apparent reason, the light in my computer room died, and simply replacing the bulbs didn't fix the problem.  Further investigation has revealed that the culprit was the dimmer switch on the wall, but I didn't discover this before buying a replacement light fitting... hey ho, time to take advantage of Argos's 16-day money-back guarantee methinks.

Sunday afternoon, while converting some MP3s to AAC format (hey, even with a 60Gb iPod, I can always make use of a little extra space), my PC powered itself off.  Now, it's been making a bit of a habit of this recently, and usually boots up again quite happily when the CPU has had time to cool off.  Not this time.  No matter how long I left it, I couldn't get the machine to boot or even POST.  It powered on, but didn't get much further than that.  So I've had to entrust it to the safe keeping of York IT Services, with a mandate to get my baby up and running again ASAP.

Monday morning, driving to work, I become aware that one of my car headlights was out.  Oh yeah, by the way, on the offchance that you're a potential purchaser of my motor, reading this in years to come, then I suggest that you skip ahead to the next blog entry - this one is really dull, nothing for you to see here, move along now.
For the rest of you, let me whinge a little about the headlights on my car.  Approximately every two months, one of them goes - they appear to be taking it in turns to piss me off, and it's working.  This has literally happened about 6 times in the last year, but whilst it only costs a fiver a time to get a replacement fitted, I'm loathe to invesigate the underlying cause, and I suppose I'll just learn to live with the problem.  Annoying, though.

Tuesday passed by peacefully, and I thought I'd turned the corner, and was congratulating myself on maintaining my abstinence from alcohol during this period.  But then on Wednesday morning, whilst driving to the office, the engine warning light on my car dashboard started flashing at me ominously.  I know next to nothing about cars, so I followed the owner's manual instruction to take the car to my nearest dealership immediately but slowly, retreating back up the A64 at around 40mph.  Incidentally, thanks to all the wankers on the road that morning who saw fit to drive right up my arse and flash their headlights - very helpful.
What's wrong with the car?  I have no idea - the folks at Polar Ford have been too busy to even look at it yet.  Ho, and indeed, hum.

In the face of all these minor trials, I finally gave in and had a couple of whiskies last night (Isle of Jura and Laphroaig, since you're asking).  Yeah, I feel a bit guilty, but they were most welcomed.

So it is that I come to be typing this on the 0723 train from York.  I've spent two days working from home (on a laptop), but am going a bit stir-crazy now, and have been less productive than usual due to not having the desktop setup available to use.

Boy, I'm ready for a holiday.  Thanks for listening...