I knew it. Broadband - off; Toothbrush - snapped; Milk - spilt; Car - smelling slightly of burning.

I really don’t like soppy, self referential, feel good blog posts, but I’m going to write one. Last night I had about four hours were everything just went right. I was on a roll and it was kind of a shame I wasn’t doing something like curing cancer or playing the tables in Vegas as I would have probably ended up a multi-billionaire, nobel laureate. As it was, I went to the gym and wrote a bit of PHP. Two problems I’d been struggling with for a while, one hardware and one software I fixed in about 5 minutes and I wrote a good few hundred lines of code which worked perfectly first time. A little sunshine, a helpful IBMer and a local radio travel and weather girl were all it took.

I’m sure I’m going to pay for it soon with a pig of day.

I’ve been on a mission to get ADSL enabled in my flat for nearly two years. First, we had the wrong type of exchange, then the wrong kind of cable (fibre not copper). I’ve managed to get ghost charged by AOL for a none existant account and had numerous routers sent and returned. BT always think it’ll work then decide it won’t.

This weekend another router arrived and I was amazed to see the magic green DSL light appear, I connected the ethernet and… What? It worked? For two days, now it doesn’t. So I rang the helpdesk and they said, “No that can’t
have happened, we’ve not enabled you yet, you’re ‘pending’”.

Humph, so helpdesk tomorrow again, meanwhile this is coming via super lowband GPRS.

Sunday lunch time I like to read the World News section of the Saturday paper. I realise I’m a day behind the newspaper, but there’s too much to read in a single day and I don’t want to miss anything.

Anyway, there was an article about the equivalent of Pop Idol/American Idol running in China. The story was that there were concerns that the show may promote democracy as an idea. It seemed a little tenuous, but the idea was something like people would think, “oh I just voted for that singer and he won, I feel good, why can’t I vote for everything?”. Yeah, well that works if you get a Kelly Clarkson or Will Young (or the lovely Sarah Whatmore), but we also got One True Voice and Hear’Say.

Clearly democracy isn’t that good.

We had an interesting conversation at work the other week about sugar. I was complaining that sugar bags always leak and are impossible to open without a few granules exploding out. I had some idea that you could still use paper but package it in large A4 sheets, like big versions of the sachets you get in cafes. Anyway, turns out it wasn’t such a problem as it does come in plastic jars. You do have to pay a premium for not spilling a few grains of sugar, but it’s worth it.

Ohhhh, I think Summer arrived today and I can’t get enough of Float On by Modest Mouse. I heard it in the middle of winter and didn’t like it at all. Now the sun’s shining, it’s completely different.