Ah yes, blogging

Call it laziness if you must. I prefer to think of it as activity displaced elsewhere. Quite where that might be, I'm not sure, but we can both agree that it's not been around here lately.

So to my loyal fan, sorry. I've been distracted, otherwise occupied, busy and just generally not in a blogging mood. I've also been in Suffolk, spending Christmas with my sister and her family, but that's not much of an excuse.

I could try to claim technological failures for my lack of communication. Last night when I switched on my (previously) trusty laptop, it resolutely failed to start. A short burst of cooling fan, a misleading 'Hello' tripping lightly across the little lcd strip at the front, and then... nothing. No disk activity, no screen flicker, no noise at all. I tried putting in the old XP setup disc and rebooting, but that didn't work either. Something more fundamental was knackered.

I've had that laptop for five years now, and apart from a self-inflicted data-loss when I mucked up putting in a bigger hard drive, it's been pretty much fault-free. I treated it to a memory upgrade before Christmas, but that didn't seem to be the problem. Old age, I figured.

Fortunately I've got my dad's PC, which is only about a year old. It's been sitting in the corner of my study staring at me with accusing eyes. I'm meant to be going through the files on it and sorting out what's important and what's not. Apart from failing to find my mother's Christmas card list, I've not fired it up much at all. There are pictures on there from the week before the accident and I'm not sure I want to brood over them right now.

But I needed a computer, and there was one lying about unused. So I started it up, managed to connect it to the internet and last night was then spent downloading about a gigabyte worth of upgrades, drivers, development software and other rubbish that I habitually fill computers with. I also pulled the hard drive out of my laptop and slipped it into the usb caddy so that I could transfer everything important across. On a whim, I slipped the old hard drive back into the laptop and switched it on...

It would seem that all my laptop wanted was to have it's innards poked a bit. Perhaps it was feeling unloved, having been largely ignored over the festive period. Perhaps it was colluding with blogger and being grumpy at me for failing to write a post in almost two weeks. Either way, it's working fine now, with the proper hard drive in it and everything. So now I have two computers up and running in my study, and I can't put off going through all those files for much longer.

Perhaps in the new year...

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