Friday, Sodding, Friday

Didn't achieve much on Friday. It is a long weekend here in Aberdeen, and plan A was to be out in the Cairngorms, head round to the Geldie, and up to the southernly plateau, and camp out tonight at Loch nan Cnapan. Maybe stay there on Saturday, just relaxing and enjoying the atmosphere. Or moving pitches to another loch that I've seen, but never been to.

But no.

I'm still not over the cold. And the walk to the post office, to (finally) post Roger his prize, knocked me sideways when I coughed and sweated my way home. It took me around 15 minutes to settle. I amn't going to risk it. maybe I'm allergic to exercise?

In the post office (2 staff on, and a queue forming), I found myself shifting my weight and fighting the temptation to circle the light leg out. Really enjoying the lessons, and wonder if it will help my balance when I get to clamber over rocks in October.

My Thursday night was spent working on restoring my crashed computer. Until I get another blue screen of death. With a hard drive error code, I've lost faith in it, and ordered a new unit. One terabyte. To be honest, I'm more interested in "cloud computing" - I'll embed the TEDtalk here, as I found they get me thinking about things.

When I got the pc back up and running, the first thing I did was get hooked back up to the Net. At the moment, my pc has antivirus software running, FireFox3, a few important upgrades for the operating system, and Windows Live Writer. Any empty shell. Much of my data is still only on the (disconnected) backup drive. Life is too short to waste on hardware crashes. Syncback handled the automatic backup. Manual backups are rubbish, and automatic backups should be checked regularly to restore user faith in them. I could throw more money at the problem, but I don't have it, and computers are a money-pit.

If systems are so unreliable that home users need to consider some form of RAID technologies to back-up their data, then the world has gone wrong. I have one spare tyre in my car. I don't have a spare car driving around after me in case the first car fails me. Get a grip! Let's see what "cloud computing" can offer us me.