And as if that wasn't bad enough

Yesterday my main email account decided to go down for twenty-four hours.

My hosting service combines three different domain names - devildog.co.uk, jamesoswald.co.uk and equinut.com* together, and I have email addresses for all of these domains, all for different reasons. All three went down for no obvious reason. Oddly enough I was still getting emails to an aliased address on the devildog domain, but the catch-all was eating anything that came anywhere near it. I don't pretend to understand mailservers, but that seems to me to be perverse behaviour, even for a computer.

I contacted my hosting service, and they had the problem sorted within twenty-four hours, but the missing emails are gone and I'll never know what they contained. Except the ones from blogger with your comments - I can see those on the blog. But if Hollywood emailed - I don't know. If my agent emailed - I don't know. If you emailed - I don't know. This time my failure to respond is really due to technical failure and not my innate rudeness.

This is the second major cock-up by that hosting provider in as many weeks, and neither time have they bothered to let me know what the problem was, or to apologize for their incompetence. I started using them because they were local, small and had good customer service. I suspect I'm going to have to start looking for someone else to host my inane ramblings. Does anyone know any good, cheap hosters out there? I need MySQL and PHP, but anything else is just greedy.

The keyboard is officially deid as a doornail. I bought it some shiny new Duracell Plus batteries and it still only wanted to give me one letter in six, usually 'o' for some inexplicable reason. Now the mouse is going the same way. It will whizz around the screen happily, and the scroll wheel works just fine, but the buttons need a hefty whack for anything to happen. So even if I could remember how to turn off the mousepad on the laptop, I need it now to get around the screen. Bah.

I tried to order a new keyboard online today, but the system broke down. I selected my particular choice, popped it in the shopping basket, went to the checkout, put in my credit card details and did all the stuff you'd expect, then got an email acknowledging my order for a completely different keyboard. Bloody pirates, trying to take twice as much money off me. I cancelled the order pronto and now I've got to try and find another one somewhere else. It's not easy, given that I've abandoned Microsoft, since it was their wireless keyboard giving up on me that has caused all the problems. There's a nice Logitech one, but it's a lot of money. Maybe I should just settle for something with a lead.

itunes is playing one of my all time favourite tracks right now. Brian Eno and John Cale - Spinning Away from the album Wrong Way Up. I don't know what it is about the track, but it just makes me feel hopeful. Things will get better, I know.

Hell, they're not even that bad, really. Just niggly little irritations getting in the way.

*it was an impulse buy for the Horse Doctor when she was toying with the idea of setting up an equine nutrition consultancy service.