I’ve suffered complete computer failure over the last few days, First the second power supply for my laptop has died. So I am no resorting to swapping between one broken power supply and the other, and the 50 or so minutes of battery life I get when (and if) the laptop is fully charged.

this is just another nail in my laptop’s coffin really, for the last 12 months, it’s being running incredibly hot, and as a result quite slow and the ‘end’ key is busted, and all wobbly. So I won’t be replacing the ?60 power supply, given how they are different makes of supply that have failed in almost the same way, I’m beginning to suspect the laptop, may be the root cause.

then one of our other ’servers’ has failed, the age old compaq we got for ?50 to act as our mail server (a while back when I was messing about with stuff) has died. We don’t really need that computer so no replacement there, the only things left working our Ruth’s computer (still has a dodgy network card though) and my Dell the first computer I ever owned.

We’ve recently recommended people we know to buy Dell PCs, they are quite cheap, nice and as my ancient Dell is testament to, very reliable. I however am not replacing my PC with a dell, I’m building my own, simply because I know how, and for the price of a low spec dell, I can get a slightly better spec homebrew PC with oodles of memory, and have two monitors building your own PC isn’t as big a saving as it use to be, and it’s really not worth it if you don’t have things you are planning to reuse, and the time to get it all talking together.

I’ve ordered the bits, and anyday now, I’m expecting two big boxes of stuff, and a fun night or two of sticking it all together, gosh I’m sad.

They don’t do a very good job of telling me exactly what the difference is, but the beeb are reporting (that’s what the do wee) that the sleep council (do they do that well?) are telling us that Lark’s should take it easy because the clocks have gone forward.

Larks should take it easy this Sunday and Monday, and not do anything that takes great concentration

so that’s me off the hook then :o)

Well it’s still not official, because paperwork can have a tendency to take it’s time, but one of the reasons I’ve not been posting much stuff to the blog, is because….. I’ve got a new job! yippe me.

If all goes quickly (and it is touch and go at the moment) I will be leaving the university at the end of April, and starting my new job as a Web Developer for Liverpool Direct (an offshoot of the council) in may.

I’ve already blogged about it a bit, but until now those posts haven’t been published, I’ve just published them all so they are dotted around the last month or so. For convenience here’s a list of the posts.

• Pastures Purple
• Telling the Boss
• Lets call the whole thing off
• It’s all quite scary (and a bit sad)
• publish and be dammed
• it’s all slighty more real now
• why are you leaving ?
• Interview Questions
• Monday Motivation

see quite a few post there it turns out.

Just to continue ‘harping’ on about light bulbs, the guardian yesterday had an article about changing everyone over to energy efficient lights, and they’ve got someone in the power industry to do the maths for them.

A clearer picture - and one that puts the “megawatts” value of CFLs into perspective - comes from Jonathan Smith of E.ON, Powergen’s parent company. “Changing every light fitting in all 20m households in the UK to energy-saver bulbs would result in a reduction on fuel bills of around 4.8bn - the cost of building 64 offshore wind farms, 53 biomass power stations, or 14 gas-fired power stations.”

that’s probably a lot more accurate than my maths about lightbulbs from a few weeks ago; but it’s also much much more saving than I estimated.

Following on from Ruth’s post about Daisy’s vocabulary development, it should be noted, that she is obviously very pleased with Mummy and Daddy’s development too. In recent weeks Daisy has moved to pointing to bits of her body (head, mouth, etc) and waiting for us to say the word. If we get it right (which we do most times) then we get a round of applause.

She must be so proud!