Ah yes, the UK is back on winter time/standard time/GMT. The thing I hate about that is that it means I wake up in the dark and go home in the dark. I have no daylight to spend in my house :( Rather depressing.

The US goes back next week which will make things interesting... Must now remember the differences are -4/-5/-6/-7 (east to west) for each of the main timezones instead of -5/-6/-7/-8. Certain parts of Australia have gone forward, so that means the time difference in Sydney is ... +11 hours, I think. Oof. Makes things difficult if I actually want to speak to anyone there and even worse for New Zealanders who are 13 hours ahead... So, er, if you live over there in the Pacific, good morning and happy Monday to you. And happy spring/summer too, enjoy the sun while we freeze and get battered by wind and rain... *Grumble* ;)

In other news, Lucy is about 3 times the size she was when we got her, has far too much energy and generally treats everything as a scratching post. Right now she is running about on the landing at top speed chasing ... probably nothing, and will probably not want to go to sleep when I do (she never does). I would post a picture but I haven't actually been able to take any as she never sits still for longer than a second. x_x

Oh, and I seem to have acquired one of those Wii things. I don't play video games usually, but someone at the boyfriend's work had one they didn't want so we took it from them :) Also came with Wii Fit which is interesting. Apparently my fitness age is 80 because I am lazy and never do anything. Hmmm.

And in case you hadn't noticed, Windows 7 appeared last week (amid 3259820935 postal strikes here in the UK anyway). Luckily my preordered copy was sent by courier so I got it on Thursday :D No, I haven't installed it - it was for the boyfriend's PC. It came with the 32-bit and 64-bit editions in one, but only one license :( So if I want to put it on my laptop (currently has Vista... Ick) I'll have to buy another copy which MS want to charge £150 for (the copy we got was preordered at 1/3rd the price!). As far as I know they don't do licenses on their own just yet but meh. Vista's alright for now, I'm not that sick of it... I do want to reformat my laptop at some stage though, it's getting slow and clunky and there's a lot of rubbish on it I could be getting rid of. I'd rather be putting Windows 7 on at that point but if I don't have it then no big deal I suppose. :P

I have two weeks off and had all sorts of things planned for them, including:

• Sort out spare room (mess)
• Finish PAI/Askably 3.1
• Sort out garden
• Sort out a load of other stuff I can never usually get done
• Insert more boring but necessary tasks here

Stuff I have done so far, one week into my holiday:

• Laid in bed feeling horrible

Fun :| And no, before you ask, I haven't got Swine Flu.

On the bright side though, we are hopefully getting a kitten next week :D That is, if I'm well enough. Urgh.

You know how I said I shouldn't be allowed near a computer?

Someone remove the things from me, because I KEEP BREAKING THEM.

Let's see. I was at work the other day, and a computer's power supply failed. I replaced it, but in doing so had to unplug one of the cooling fans because it was in the way of a cable I needed to remove. Problem was, the inside of the computer was so dusty I couldn't see where I was meant to plug it back in. I sprayed some compressed air around a bit to clean it up and all was well, right? Wrong. In doing that I'd fried the motherboard. -_-

Fast forward to this morning. My old laptop has Linux on it, and I boot it up every now and then to do some geeky stuff on it. Today was one of those days - it had been unused for 2 weeks, nothing out of the ordinary for it as it's sat for months without being touched. I put it on and - BEEP BEEP BEEP FIZZ FIZZ BANG. Smoke starts coming from everywhere. D: D: D: It went no further than that, thankfully, but I can assure you the thing's dead :P Looks like there was a short circuit of some kind... Yeah. RIP laptop :(

So, that's computer #4 I've killed (Well, it's the same as #1 really, but seeing as it's a different motherboard and stuff, I'm counting it as a different computer), and #2 this week. Some might say I'm getting rather good at this.

I'm going to get the hell away from this computer (current laptop) before it too explodes. I have no idea how I managed to build a PC without frying it (been going one month so far, and everything seems ok :S) as I don't really seem to be cut out for this whole thing.

Yeah. Excuse me while I go into hiding now...

Edit: I took the whole thing apart and it seems the connection between the motherboard and the power inlet has burnt out - I took some pics if you're at all interested (yes, I'm sad like that), they can be seen on Flickr.

Bear in mind this computer was by no means well, so it dying completely was probably not something that should have come as much of a surprise. I dropped water on this thing too many times to count, almost broke its processor, dropped it/knocked it more than I dropped water on it (and that's saying something), took it on holiday several times to different climates it probably didn't like... Add to that the fact that its screen backlight was going, its power connection was loose (yes, probably should have remembered that before using it today -_- ), the motherboard had already fried itself once and been replaced, and the battery had died about 3 or 4 years ago. Nonetheless, it's sad to see it go - it was my 18th birthday present and my first computer that was really mine. It was 6 years old and for a cheap, generic model, that's about 2 years more than I would have expected it to last with me as its owner anyway :P