It’s late Monday afternoon. I have a headache. At least my innards have stopped their cement mixer impressions.

Anyway, to the subject of this posting, the weekend…

Friday
evening I travelled down to Yateley, near Farnborough, Hants to visit Rachel,
Graham and not so little anymore, Christopher. When I arrived, Rachel was
coming down with a cold, Christopher was going up to bed, Graham was helping
and the little cat from down the road was making herself at home.

Rachel
didn’t last being awake much longer, even after the big chinese takeaway
Graham went off and ordered. It had been an eventful day in the Hartland
household.

Saturday started ok, though Rachel was in no state to think
and was very surprised when I entered the kitchen. After getting her bearings
and being told by Graham, “Steve.. Friend.” slowly she calmed down. Tea and
breakfast brought the brain in gear. Following breakfast was a period of
legoing and thence into Hook to deliver 7 boxes of old books and a box of
ICL mugs to any charity shop we could find to take them.. which luckily was
the first we asked. The return journey was taken via the Hartley Wintney
Recycle Centre where Graham called me over to the place where the electronic
stuf was placed…

Sitting there was a PC.. it looked in decent nick..
it had cables and manuals and driver disks.. it had a TV/Radio/Video cardand
40x CDROM in it.. The maximum charge for taking stuff from teh tip was £5..
I paid £5 and took the PC, manuals and drivers away! 🙂

Later excitement
included a hour playing cricket in the park before dinner and then lazing
in front of the telly looking at the last night of the proms and being texted
by Alec, who was at the London Prom in the Park. Oh, and I tried to install
the DVD player software which came with Shrek only to find out that the DVD
player software needed another DVD player software installed on the machine
before it would work.. eh? Oh well. I did find a shareware DVD player which
didn’t work itself but did install enough of the right things for the one
on the Shrek DVD to work. Still, the 333MHz Celeron in their machine is still
not fast enough to give a nice smooth display but it is watchable.

Sunday
arose with me having a few stomach spasms,, I knew what was coming later
but decided that it wasn’t going to ruin my stay, so I ignored it. After
rising after Graham, Rachel & Chris had gone to the church, I set up
the PC to connect to my camera so as to upload the pictures I’d taken the
day before up to the PC. After lunch is was generally playing with lego,
Graham playing with my camera (‘cos his interest in digital photography had
been sparked by Bob’s Olympus but he wasn’t prepared to spend £1500). Later
came showing all my photos before journeying off to Alec’s for pancakes followed
by basket ball without the basket.

By the time I got home, at about
8pm, my insides were not very happy at all.. to cut a long story short, after
going to bed and failing to sleep I got up and started testing the bits of
that old PC I’d picked up for £5. Everything but the power supply and the
hard disk worked.. so it was a bit of a bargin. The TV tuner/Radio card is
now in my main PC. It works under Windows and by the tiem I’d gone back to
bed I’d got it working under Linux too.

This morning I couldn’t get up ’til 9:30am, so I wandered into work as best I could, getting in before 11am.