Even Homer sometimes nods

I occasionally wonder how (to coin a phrase) I manage to walk and chew gum at the same time.   

I've just treated myself to my very first e-reader - not a Kindle, but a Nook, because above all I want to be able to borrow e-books from the library (via my laptop to the reader) and Kindles don't let you do that. I'd thought first of getting a tablet, but we're on a wired network here, not wi-fi, so that wouldn't have worked. However, what silly me didn't take into account is that I would need wi-fi to register my e-reader with the manufacturer (the book chain Barnes & Noble) to get it to work at all. 

The result is that I have a spiffing little e-reader, fully charged, but not able to go anywhere until I head off to borrow my sister's wi-fi tomorrow. Doh!

At least I don’t have to grapple with a cat at the same time….

Image via Google

My broadband is poorly

We have developed an intermittent fault on our phone line here in Wales and it’s been  slowing down our broadband speed to a crawl much of the time. I’m afraid this means that you are all writing your wonderful posts faster than I can get online to read them, for which I apologise. Photos are taking an age to load and YouTube is a complete no-no. Sigh….

The engineers are visiting us tomorrow to see if they can track down the fault, but with so much line to examine between us and the exchange it could take some time. It’s one of the few downsides to living high in the Welsh hills. But I never despair and I WILL be back. J

Lying fallow?

Like a number of bloggers I follow, I’m finding that after the intensity of Holy Week and Easter, my mind seems to have gone on to standby as far as inspiration is concerned. Or perhaps it’s just that all my available mental energy is being absorbed by my new acquisition.

Yes, dear readers, all the detailed and careful research I mentioned in passing in my last post came to fruition last Saturday with the delivery of this year's birthday present and my brand-new pride and joy – my very first laptop!  

I feel I should apologise for teasing you all with such secrecy about a basically mundane purchase. Yet to me it feels very far from mundane. Since the moment I first clicked tentatively on a computer mouse nearly 20 years ago now, all my computing has been done on a series of desktop machines, mostly DH’s cast-offs.

Not for me the app-laden smartphone or glossy tablet: instead I’ve been nursing the same ageing desktop since before I retired 5 years ago and it’s still going strong, albeit rather more slowly, like its owner. I blame my addiction to blogging for making me realise I needed a means of mobile computing, and for me a laptop was the only sensible solution.

Hence the poring over internet searches - reading reviews, comparing specifications and looking for reliability reports - which took so much time early last week. The Transit household really doesn’t go in for off-the-cuff purchases. J

Now that DH has finished setting up my new baby, I’m spending every spare moment getting to grips with Windows 7 and all the other innovations which have passed me by for so long. It’s a steep learning curve and my brain is beginning to hurt a bit, but I’m gradually getting there and am enjoying the process enormously. It doesn’t take much to make me happy…….

The wheel turns full circle

The recent appearance of this item of technological news on the BBC website has been the cause of much quiet hilarity in the Transit household. Quiet, because DH and I are still suffering the after-effects of the horrendous cold so kindly passed on to us by Grandson #1 during our visit, which means that laughing out loud soon becomes coughing out loud and for much longer. Hilarity, nonetheless, because until relatively recently our loft contained the remains of at least one of the original Commodore 64 models, bought by DH at the dawn of the personal computer era.

It was back in the late 1970s that DH, then working in education, was asked by an old college friend to look critically at some educational software which his firm was going to launch in the UK. On his return DH said something about having seen the future and was then immediately reabsorbed into his frantically busy working life.

But it wasn’t long before he decided that this new development was too important to ignore and became the proud possessor of one of the first Commodore PET machines to be imported into the UK, complete with integral cassette data storage and a massive 8KB of RAM.

That first purchase set the pattern for the future. In 1982 the PET was superseded by the Commodore 64, which of course DH bought, and it was on these two very basic machines that DS and DD learned first to use computers and then to program them. 

This photo isn’t of the highest quality to say the least (a scan of an original which started to fade years ago) and I can assure you that DS, at the tender age of 12 or so, (no dated photos back then) was NOT working underwater. But he was acquiring a skill which has stood him in very good stead ever since, and already knew more about computer programming than i will ever learn.

My only regret about those far-off pioneer days of home computing is that we had no spare cash to invest in the very small, new software company that DH spotted at the first computer exhibition he ever went to, and thought might go places. Its name was Microsoft.