Well, that wasn't what I planned!

How lucky it is that I was given a notebook for my birthday - because within a week of its arrival, my hard disk crashed with a mighty crash. This happened last night, just after I had uploaded a typo to a web site I am working on (and let that be a lesson to me not to try to squeeze in one more piece of work after dinner, on a day when up to that point I'd been feeling that I was getting things done).

durham_rambler sat up half the night, because that's the kind of bear he is, and managed to scrape a backup off the section of the hard disk that contains my data (yes, of course we run regular backups anyway, but the most recent was a couple of weeks ago). And this morning he prodded it some more, and decided it really wasn't going to co-operate; so he took it down to the friendly neighbourhood computer store and bought it a new hard disk.

On which he is currently installing the most recent full backup. We have no idea how long this is going to take. The program offers estimates of how much longer it has to run, which vary from 45 days to 70 days (and seem as likely to increase as to decrease). Google suggests that it is notoriously pessimistic, and we are hoping that will turn out to be the case.

Meanwhile I am learning to manage the touchpad on my notebook (which I am finding easier than I expected, except when it isn't). And am hoping that we won't have to install all the software on it that would allow me to do some serious work. And I have - for the first time in years - baked a couple of loaves of bread.

So it's not all bad news.