Just a reminder that we turn the clocks back at the weekend.
I'll be turning ours back to 1940, to when the country had balls and teeth, rather than keeping it set to 2019 with the country at the mercy of overseas knobs with too much lip.
WWII Sector Clock image posted under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (see here).
Post inspired by CJR.
I bought this R61i ThinkPad in a sale back before Lenovo acquired IBM's personal computer business in 2005. It had every feature that I wanted at the time - plenty of connectivity features, wide-screen, UltraBay system, dockable, what was a huge HDD back then (160 gig), and, IMO, the best Windows operating system at the time - XP.
Over the years I've tinkered with it - it's not in the same league as "Trigger's Broom" but now it has a 1TB HDD inside, a second 1TB HDD in an UltraBay caddy, additional RAM to take it to max for the operating system (still XP, but with all SP3 updates), and USB 3.0 capability thanks to an ExpressCard USB 3.0 Adapter. The only parts failures have been the cooling-fan assy which was a cheap fix, the battery (I got a full decade out of the original before it degraded) and the matt screen which I was going to replace with a glossy one anyway. I even paired it up with an Advanced Dock to get even more ports, an extra UltraBay slot, and dual-monitor capability.
It was perfect for my needs, it did whatever I asked of it, I looked after it and it hardly ever complained. It owed me nothing.
But last Wednesday I let it down. I drenched it. In my elation at being told that I would be discharged from the hospital for a week or so, I decided to celebrate by going outside for the rare pleasures of some fresh air and a bit of sunlight. While slinging my jacket on I knocked over a full cup of well-sugared tea, and almost all of it went into the laptop. There were pops, crackles, fizzing and bleeping, so I pulled the mains plug, hit the on/off button and removed the battery and the UltraBay HDD - both were soaked.
I drained everything as best I could, leaving a ThinkPad-shaped stain on the hospital blanket, but after a few hours it refused to start. I brought it home and started to mourn my loss and to curse my careless enthusiasm.
But a day later I had time to give it some TLC so I put it on a hot radiator for a few hours in an effort to dry it out. If it wouldn't start after that, I was going to take it apart, clean and dry its guts, and reassemble it, but it wasn't necessary... first attempt: bleep then shut-down... second attempt: BIOS fan-error message then shut-down... third attempt: no fan-error but shut-down on Windows start... fourth attempt: up and running again! Aside from a somewhat sticky shift key and a mild aroma of caramel, it's back as it was before. It's been running fine since then, apart from the occasional fan-error on start-up.
Result!
Trigger's Laptop... "Well here's a picture of it, what more proof do you need?"
In the dim & distant it wasn't the staff who needed protection...
From 1976 to 1981 we had to put up will all sorts of verbal and physical abuse there... usually from "Greasy Reesy" (Mr. G. J. Rees - Vice Principal and Sexist Thug) who, if he didn't agree that your footwear complied with the school uniform rules, would berate you in front of whoever was there and confiscate said footwear on-the-spot. He would put it in a dedicated full-wall pigeon-hole unit for all to see, and further humiliate you by making you spend the rest of the day with only socks on your feet regardless of weather, terrain or activity.
At the end of the school day you might get said footwear back if you grovelled enough, but by then you'd have missed the school bus, so it was always a toss-up between walking 4 miles home with shoes, or going on the bus barefoot because your socks had been worn through.
Boots would be confiscated for the rest of the term.
Of course, his policy applied only to the boys.
My neighbour was clearing out her shed, she found this tank in a box of tools that belonged to her Dad, and she's kindly given it to me:
Ironically, it appears to have better build-quality than my Kia 🙂
I've got whites, blues, downers, uppers, flash, halos, LSD LED...
It helps if you have the right connections.
I went to the Post Office to send a parcel.
On display was a modern representation of a bit of nostalgia... a Thunderbirds motion-stamp set:
The grown-up side of me started to walk away, but by then the boyhood side had rifled through the coins in my pockets and bought the thing.
It's cool. Get one.
