Mind Wrecker

Spent the weekend in Devon again. It drizzled. By all accounts it was peeing down in Wiltshire though, so we probably travelled in the right direction. I installed Mother's broadband. It went in surprisingly easily actually.

Why do service providers always provide an install disk? They never work. In fact, all I had to do was connect up, set up a network connection, and it was running. However, like an idiot I then put the installation disk in the tray, whereupon it performed a test and concluded that the connection between PC and hub was down. I don't know why I believed it. The light was on. The "network cable unplugged" message popped up every time I disconnected the cable. But I called the call centre in India anyway and spent 20 minutes finding out that in fact the connection was fine, and that the installation disk was crap. Of course, the smart thing to do would have been to simply test it. It was working perfectly well, I just didn't realise it.

My brother showed up yesterday with a laptop, so I even got the wireless connection going too. Mother doesn't need it, but I guess it's useful if we ever need to connect. So there you are, I can still do IT support.

It's a four day week. I didn't want to buy a weekly season ticket on the train for just 4 days, so I'm driving to work this week. I don't like to drive, and I'm a terrible driver, but it's convenient and cheaper than the train. I can also listen to the radio as I drive. I suppose I could listen to the radio on the train through headphones actually, but I never do. I can't read in the car though. That would be dangerous.

I have a backlog of things to read again. I just finished Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind book, which I would highly recommend. It took me ages to read because I kept stopping to try things out. One of the reasons I have a backlog is because the Derren Brown book has a huge bibliography in the back, about half of which I now want to read. But I'm going to read the Kite Runner next. The Dragon read it in Chinese months ago and has been nagging me to read it in English ever since. She says it's too sad to read on the train though. Unfortunately I don't have time to read anywhere else, so I'll have to wear dark glasses and sob quietly if it gets unbearably sad.

I'm still watching Lost. I've just seen episode 7, series 4. What a mind wrecker! I have no idea what's going on any more. There seem to be about four different time lines now, and none of them appear to run chronologically. Dead people keep showing up, and people I thought were alive seem to be dead. And Michael's shown up again with a new name and hairstyle. How did that happen? And what's he done with Walt?